I do not claim any deep understanding of Finnegans Wake, but I believe that, had Murray Gell-Mann known the existence of more than three elementary constituents of hadronic matter, he would have chosen a different name. This paper is my recollection of the events that led to the conjecture about a lepton–hadron symmetric world. I want to warn the reader that, as I discovered experimentally, my memory is partial and selective. I would have been particularly worried by this discovery, had I not discovered at the same time that I share this human defect with practically all my colleagues. The difference is that most people are not aware of it, as I was not a couple of years ago, and, furthermore, different people forget or distort different things.

As far as I am concerned, the story begins around 1967 or 1968. I was on a postdoctoral fellowship at CERN coming from the University of Paris at Orsay, where I had done my thesis work under the direction of Philippe Meyer and Claude Bouchiat. I came to CERN in September 1966 and started working on current algebra, one of the most fashionable subjects at that time. Together with other postdocs and visitors, we formed a band of joyful youngsters, enjoying tremendously both physics and skiing, mountaineering, eating, drinking, and so on. We were not doing much in terms of physics, but as David Sutherland, a member of the band, put it, we were doing it in great style.