This chapter gives an overview of Gérard Grisey’s youth and early musical formation. It shows how, having been given an accordion at the age of five, Grisey went on to become a youthful virtuoso on the instrument, winning medals at the accordion World Cup. It discusses how, as a teenager, Grisey became preoccupied with music, religion, and death, three topics that were for him intimately linked, and how Grisey’s later musical values of beauty, clarity, and perceptivity were already established by the time he arrived at the Paris Conservatoire. It details aspects of his compositional training in Trossingen under Helmut Degen and in Paris under Henri Duttileux, before finishing with a glimpse of Grisey’s interest in the Catholic mystic and scientist Teilhard de Chardin.