At 12 years old, he applies for a job as an interpreter, and the board of directors bursts out laughing… until he says, “Choose any language!”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
Antoine Delcourt’s voice echoed through the enormous conference room on the thirty-second floor, in the heart of the La Défense business district.
Seated at the far end of the long black table, Lucas Moreau nodded.
Twelve years old. A gray T-shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers slightly worn at the edges. His backpack rested against his chair, with a spiral notebook sticking out.
Absolutely nothing about his appearance matched the profile of the candidates usually interviewed at Delcourt International.
Around the table, eight executives watched him with bewilderment: the chief financial officer, the human resources director, several lawyers, and managers responsible for international markets. They all wore impeccable suits and were thirty or forty years older than him.
No one could quite understand how this boy had managed to end up there.
Three weeks earlier, an application had been submitted through the company’s website for a senior interpreter position. The résumé was astonishingly simple: no professional experience, no degrees, just a list of languages he claimed to speak.
The head of human resources had nearly deleted the application. In the end, as a precaution, she sent the candidate an online written test.
The results left everyone speechless.
The candidate, identified by the initials “L. Moreau,” had achieved the highest score ever recorded by the company. Six languages translated without a single mistake, with nuances that even some experienced proofreaders had failed to notice.
Intrigued, Claire Dubois, the human resources director, had summoned the entire executive committee for the final interview.
She expected to meet a man in his forties.
Instead, a twelve-year-old boy walked through the door.
Antoine folded his hands on the table.
“Well?”
“I’m here for the interpreter position,” Lucas replied.
Two executives exchanged an incredulous glance. Claire looked down at the nearly empty file in front of her, as though an explanation might suddenly appear among the few sheets of paper.
“The interpreter position?” Antoine repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re twelve years old.”
“I know.”
A young executive stifled a smile behind his hand.
“And what makes you think you’re capable of doing a job like this?”
Lucas took a deep breath.
“I speak several languages fluently.”
The silence lasted barely a second.
Then Antoine burst out laughing.
It wasn’t a polite smile meant to conceal his embarrassment. It was genuine, almost joyful laughter, the kind of laughter that comes from a man convinced he has just heard an excellent joke.
“At twelve? Are you serious?”
Several executives joined in. Marc Lefèvre, the sales director, leaned toward the woman sitting next to him. Even Claire had to bite her lip to keep from smiling.
Someone whispered loudly enough for everyone at the table to hear:
“Is this a hidden-camera prank?”
Lucas felt his cheeks flush. His fingers tightened around the seam of his jeans.
He could have stood up and walked away. He knew this kind of reaction. He had faced it at school when his teachers refused to acknowledge that he spoke certain languages better than they did. He had also encountered it at the doctor’s office, when he translated the words of an elderly Portuguese woman in the waiting room.
Everywhere he went, he met adults who were convinced that a child should know his place and never try to exceed the limits they had set for him.
But this time, Lucas refused to give up.
He raised his head.
Antoine’s laughter gradually faded when he met the boy’s gaze. Lucas no longer looked nervous. His face now showed an astonishing calm, almost unsettling in someone so young.
“Choose a language,” Lucas declared.
Antoine tilted his head slightly.
“Excuse me?”
“Any language,” the boy clarified. “You can choose whichever one you want.”
This time, the laughter stopped completely.
Antoine folded his arms.
“Very well. German.”
Lucas immediately replied in perfectly fluent German:
“Stellen Sie mir eine Frage.” Ask me a question.
Antoine blinked. He had studied in Frankfurt and knew enough German to put a candidate on the spot.
He began with a simple sentence, then followed up with a more complex formulation involving an especially tricky subjunctive construction.
Lucas answered without the slightest hesitation.
“He probably learned that at school,” Marc muttered, clearly determined not to be impressed.
“Spanish,” Antoine called out.
Without waiting, Lucas switched to Spanish. His delivery was natural, his pronunciation impeccable, and his slight Andalusian accent was authentic enough to wipe the smile from Claire’s face.
“Italian,” Marc interjected in a challenging tone.
Lucas continued in Italian with the same ease.
Then he switched to Brazilian Portuguese before moving on to English, which he spoke with such a precise British accent that a lawyer who had studied in London suddenly raised his head.
By the fifth language, no one was laughing anymore.
Antoine had abandoned his random questions. He was now studying Lucas carefully, searching for some detail that might reveal rehearsed answers or a weakness.
“Arabic?” he asked.
Lucas responded in Modern Standard Arabic before naturally adding a sentence in Moroccan Arabic dialect.
Claire straightened in her chair.
“You speak Arabic too?”
The boy switched back to French.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How long have you been speaking it?”
“Since I was six.”
Marc uncrossed his arms, then crossed them again, visibly unsettled.
“Mandarin,” he finally challenged.
For the first time since the interview began, Lucas paused briefly.
Half a second, no more.
But that tiny moment was enough to draw every eye toward him.
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Marc wore a satisfied smile.
“There it is.”
Then the boy answered.
Claire, who had worked in Shanghai for three years, abruptly turned toward him. She asked him three questions, including one that was more personal. Lucas answered naturally, correcting a few of his own mistakes along the way.
“This isn’t memorized,” Claire observed. “He’s thinking directly in the language.”
The atmosphere changed. The adults were no longer amused. They were intrigued.
“How many languages do you speak?” Antoine asked.
“Thirteen. Six fluently, and the others well enough to understand and get by.”
“Thirteen?” Marc repeated incredulously.
“I prefer to be honest about what I can’t do,” Lucas replied.
When asked about how he had learned the languages, he lowered his eyes.
“With my mother. She was an interpreter.”
His voice trembled. No one pressed him for more details.
Suddenly, Antoine’s assistant rushed into the room. The Japanese delegation had arrived two hours ahead of schedule, but their interpreter was stranded in Lyon. No agency could send someone quickly enough.
Antoine looked at Lucas.
“Do you speak Japanese?”
“Yes. It was my mother’s favorite language.”
Five minutes later, the delegation entered the room. Among its members was Mr. Nakamura, chairman of a powerful Japanese industrial group.
The meeting began. Lucas translated with remarkable precision, even when the discussions turned to complex legal clauses. Before long, the Japanese executives were addressing him more often than they addressed Antoine.
Then Nakamura made a polite remark. Lucas suddenly stopped speaking.
“He isn’t simply saying that our proposal is difficult,” Lucas explained. “The way he phrased it means they’re considering withdrawing from the negotiations.”
Thanks to that observation, Antoine realized that a clause in the contract had deeply offended his Japanese partners. The discussion resumed, and the contract was renegotiated.
At the end of the meeting, Nakamura spoke quietly to Lucas. The boy turned pale.
“He asked me if I was Sophie Moreau’s son. He recognized the way I greeted him.”
Antoine checked the company’s archives. Sophie had worked at Delcourt International for nine years before abruptly resigning twelve years earlier.
Claire found an envelope Sophie had left behind. Inside was a letter explaining that she was pregnant and wanted to devote her life to her child.
She hoped that one day, her son would use languages to bring people closer together.
Lucas finally understood why his mother had passed on so much knowledge to him.
Antoine offered him a training program tailored to his age, without putting him on the payroll as an employee.
Six years later, Lucas returned to that very same room, now a professional interpreter with varying levels of proficiency in fifteen languages.
Antoine handed him his identification badge.
“Which language shall we start with?”
Lucas smiled.
“Your choice. Any language.”
