True Summit Read Free Page B

nothing more than a gilded myth, one man’s romantic idealization of the campaign that had claimed the first 8,000-meter peak. What had really happened in 1950 was far darker, more complex, more nebulous than anything Herzog had written. I found myself resisting Michel’s strictures: historical revisionism is an all too faddish trend of the day, especially in France.
    Michel persisted. Before they had left France, the members of the expedition had been required to sign an oath of unquestioning obedience to their leader. This was not news to me, for Herzog had mentioned that pledge in his book, even recording the somewhat timid acquiescence of his teammates: “My colleagues stood up, feeling both awkward and impressed. What were they supposed to do?”
    What I didn’t know before that evening in Morzine was that, along with the oath of obedience, the team members had been required to sign a contract forbidding them to publish anything about the expedition for five years after their return to France. During those first five years, by prearrangement, the only version of the Annapurna story that might emerge would be Herzog’s.
    As soon as the moratorium expired, Lachenal had made plans to publish an autobiographical memoir, to be called Carnets du Vertige ( Notebooks of the Vertiginous ). The book had come out in 1956. Years ago, I had found a copy in a used book store in the States. ( Carnets has never been translated into English.) The last quarter of the book consists of Lachenal’s diary from Annapurna. As I read it, I perceived no real discrepancy between his account and Herzog’s, except that Lachenal was a far more laconic, down-to-earth narrator than his vision-haunted leader.
    Now Michel told me that, just as Carnets was going to press, Lachenal had been killed when he skied into a crevasse on the Vallée Blanche above Chamonix. I knew all about that too-early death of one of my Annapurna heroes, but nothing about what its timing signified. As soon as Lachenal had died, Herzog had taken charge of the manuscript and turned it over to his brother, Gérard, for editing. In the process, both Maurice Herzog and Lucien Devies—the president of the Club Alpin Français and the man who had devised and administered the oath of obedience to the Annapurna team—carefully combed the text. Among the three of them, they pruned Lachenal’s account of every scrap of critical, sardonic, or embittered commentary the guide had penned. The published Carnets du Vertige was a sanitized, expurgated whitewash.
    In Chamonix, Michel had befriended Lachenal’s son, Jean-Claude, who for decades had held the original manuscript that his father had written. Though furious at Herzog’s intercession, Jean-Claude was deeply torn in his feelings, for on Lachenal’s death, Herzog had assumed the role of tuteur to the bereaved family—an official post mandated by French law. The same man who betrayed his father’s truth took Jean-Claude and his brother on many a childhood forest walk and supervised their rocky passage through a series of schools.
    After years of friendship and discussion, Michel had persuaded Jean-Claude to let him publish an unexpurgated version of the Carnets. The book would be out in a few months; already it was causing a stir in mountaineering circles. At the same time, journalist Yves Ballu was about to publish the first biography of Rébuffat, to be called Gaston Rébuffat: Une Vie pour la Montagne ( Gaston Rébuffat: A Life for the Mountains ). Ballu had received the full cooperation of Rébuffat’s widow, Françoise, who had enjoined her husband not to write about Annapurna in his lifetime. In particular, Ballu would benefit from Gaston’s long and acerbic letters to Françoise from the expedition, and from private notes and marginal commentaries he had jotted down in subsequent years.
    The upshot of Rébuffat’s and Lachenal’s