On the vertices of a tree A we dispose real and lid random variables. We study the maximum S-n* of the sums of those variables encountered on the length n branches of A. We introduce the entropic number e(A) of A. If Lambda denotes the large deviations functions of the basic law, we show that lim sup(n-->infinity) Sn*/n less than or equal to Lambda(-1)[log(e(A))], with equality in the gaussian case.