Despite preconceived ideas, pupils with high intellectual potential are not always successful at school. At the end of the 1980s, the French Ministry of Education was first called to account for this paradox. Was there a link between intellectual ability and certain difficulties in adjustment? Over the course of a school year at the Georges Brassens state secondary school in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, where an integration scheme has been in place for these types of pupils for the past fifteen years, the narrator and the various protagonists look back over their lives to identify the nuances of this question, which has become a key issue in the public debate.