Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
foot grew weary holding down the pedal, so he insisted she floor the accelerator while
he drove. After a stretch of driving thus, he abruptly stopped, got out of the car, and
picked up a wayside brick. From then on, the brick held down the accelerator, to be
nudged aside only in extremis.
Speed gave Lachenal's life momentary purpose again. He set out to break the un-
official records for long-distance jaunts in France, whittling his Paris-Chamonix time
down to six hours and forty minutes. (Today's best time, on the autoroutes that have
changed the countryside, is still only five and a half hours.)
Lachenal suffered a number of spectacular one-car accidents, rolling his vehicle
more than once, yet emerging unscathed. Adèle was terrified of his driving from the
start; soon no one else wanted to get in the car with him. Some witnesses insist that
Lachenal was utterly scrupulous to avoid involving other vehicles in a crash. Yet an-
other persistent tale has him driving back from Paris with Terray's wife, Marianne,
who was a great beauty. Jean-Pierre Payot recalls the aftermath: “Lachenal called me
by phone. 'Where are you?' I asked. 'Come to Geneva and pick me up,' he said. 'I
missed a corner in Burgundy and the car rolled. I had to take a train to Geneva. As for
Marianne—she's had herself done over well.'
“I wondered what he was talking about. When I picked him up, I found out. Mari-
anne had been knocked out or fainted in the crash. He stopped a cattle truck and laid
her down in the straw. He took advantage of her state to look at her breasts. Evidently
she'd had plastic surgery. In the official version of the story, he only looked at her
eyes.”
In Conquistadors, Terray cogently analyzed the motivation behind Lachenal's wild
driving:
Those who saw in it a taste for exhibitionism were quite mistaken. Lachenal's passion for
speed bore no relation to vanity. It was a drug to some imperious inner need of his nature. I
have often seen him about to set out in his Dyna, and asked: “Where are you off to?” He
would reply: “Nowhere. Just a drive.” Nobody ever heard of most of his exploits, which he
indulged in for the sheer joy of the thing.
In 1952, Lachenal traveled to the Belgian Congo with Adèle to present a number of
slide shows on Annapurna. The heat debilitated him, but while there he seized upon
the idea of climbing the highest peak in the snow-capped Ruwenzori—the “Mountains
of the Moon.” A climbing friend from the Alps happened to be heading for the same
range with a small team, so Lachenal joined forces with them. The mountain posed no
real technical obstacles, but at 17,100 feet, it stood more than a thousand feet higher
Search WWH ::




Custom Search