Biography|Arthur Mensch — The Prépa Years Behind the Queen's Chapel at Lycée Hoche

People who meet Arthur Mensch as the chief executive of Mistral AI tend to start the story in a Paris lab in 2023.

The path that made that lab possible began two suburbs west, in a former royal convent.

Mensch was born on 17 July 1992 in Sèvres and raised in nearby Ville-d'Avray, in the Hauts-de-Seine belt around Paris.

His mother taught physics. His father ran a small computer-server firm. A grandfather had already worked on health-data systems.

After the international baccalauréat he entered the two-year classe préparatoire at Lycée Hoche, at 73 avenue de Saint-Cloud in Versailles.

Hoche is one of the French schools that feed École polytechnique. The C building, where literature, languages and mathematics are taught, occupies the old Couvent de la Reine, founded for Marie Leszczyńska and protected as a historic monument since 1926.

The chapel still stands in the courtyard. Students walk past it between the twice-weekly oral drills the system calls khôlles.

On his own time he later worked as a colleur himself, putting prépa students in Neuilly through mathematics orals.

The Versailles years were not a brand story. They were the grind that the grandes écoles still require: two years of competitive mathematics and physics aimed at a single concours.

In 2011 that concours sent him to Palaiseau as a member of promotion X2011.

The pin is the public school, not a private house. The convent and chapel are what a visitor can still stand in front of.

Photo: chapel of Lycée Hoche, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Slush, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons