Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of widows such as Adèle. Herzog offered to serve as
tuteur
to the two boys, and she
accepted.
Over the coming years, Herzog went for walks in the woods and ski outings with
Lachenal's sons. He supervised their uncertain progress through a series of schools. He
may well have given the family money.
In
L'Autre Annapurna
Herzog offers several vignettes of “my dear little angels.”
These emphasize their unruly misbehavior, particularly that of the older son, Jean-
Claude: threatening another boy with a razor, swinging a croquet mallet that hits a
female TV star guest square in the face. Such delinquency Herzog softens as a boys-
will-be-boys penchant for mayhem, but in a subtle way his handling of it extends to
the next generation his conceit of Lachenal as an impetuous genius-madman. Herzog
in fact quotes a schoolmaster, complaining about Jean-Claude's bullying of classmates,
as seeing in the son “the very picture of his father when it comes to character.”
There is no evidence that Herzog took on the role of
tuteur
to Lachenal's sons out
of any Machiavellian motive. He seems, moreover, to have taken his responsibilities as
guardian of those sons seriously. But at the same time as he sprang to the rescue of the
family, he took over the preparation of
Carnets du Vertige
for publication.
Philippe Cornuau, Lachenal's collaborator, recalls how this happened. “Not long
after Lachenal's death, Herzog told me to give the papers to his brother, Gérard. All of
Lachenal's business was taken over by Herzog. At the time, I didn't protest. It seemed
logical, for Herzog was the
tuteur.
I couldn't have inished the topic alone. At irst I
helped a bit with the preparation of
Carnets.
And I didn't want to provoke any scandal
by resisting—I didn't want people to say, 'Cornuau is making a profit out of Lachenal.'
“Later I realized just how worried Herzog was about what Lachenal might say. One
day he said to me, 'People have a great need of dreams, of beautiful stories. It's import-
ant not to disappoint them.' I didn't understand him at the time. Later it made sense.
Herzog didn't want any of the negative stuff to come out.
“But when I gave all my notes to Gérard Herzog, I had no premonition of what
would happen. I was shocked when the topic came out.”
Cornuau had typed up a copy of Lachenal's diary from Annapurna. On that
typescript, Maurice Herzog and Lucien Devies made their marginal comments, for
Gérard's guidance in editing it. Thanks to the survival of the typescript, we gain an
intimate perspective on the process by which Lachenal's truth was posthumously ex-
purgated.
In a short preamble to the journal that Lachenal wrote in 1955, he ironically quotes
part of the next-to-last line of
Annapurna,
which reads, “Annapurna, to which we had
gone emptyhanded, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days.” After
