Defining who I am, what I believe in, and where I exercise my responsabilities, whether within my family, the city, or the companies I am in charge of; taking from this experience a message of hope for the future, a moral for the individual, a conception of society: this is the aim of this essay , written by M. Baroin, the former Grand Master of the Grand-Orient de France, who died in an aircrash in 1987.