How many times did we pick up the phone to hear him growl, without preamble, in that voice that punched words and rushed syntax: "You haven't understood a thing!" This was followed by some telling off, a plea, a lecture, or all three at once. But Claude Allègre will call no more. He died on Saturday, January 4, his son told Agence France-Presse. He was 87 years old.

He was a surprising character who stood out. He was scruffy and inventive, peremptory and funny, as irritating as he was endearing, as reformative as he was clumsy, as willful as he was volcanic. He was assertive to the point of bad faith, iconoclastic by principle and brutal by conviction. He was rebellious, but with a solid appetite for power, always charging ahead, castigating and brawling, always cramped, both in convention and in his suit. "I don't believe in consensus reforms" was his credo. For better, sometimes for worse, he constantly demonstrated this, in his life as a scientist and as a minister.

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