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According to [Herzog], Gaston didn't go to war.
Nonsense! He was no planqué [a man who goes under cover to wait out the war]; that
would not have fit his character at all.
M. Herzog seems to be going to great lengths to minimize the merit of his rope-mates
and the valor of their contribution, without whom he would not have returned [from An-
napurna] alive.
Rébuffat's widow then backhanded Herzog with her own sharp slap:
To dare to write that with Terray he alone went to war, while he is perfectly aware of the
past lives of his companions, gives precisely the tone in which Annapurna was written.
Finally, Françoise laid out the details of the unmistakably heroic campaign of
Rébuffat's battalion in liberating the valley of Chamonix from the Nazis.
The end of Herzog's letter to Le Monde reaches a pinnacle of proud dudgeon:
In conclusion, these latter-day and to my mind utterly niggardly rewritings matter very
little in the face of our historic victory. The facts are plain. No one contests them. All that
remains of the tragedy that followed are the stigmata on my flesh. No one talks of that, but
I will remember it forever.
Here, at last, Herzog's identification with Christ becomes explicit.
During much of 1997, as the controversy slowly died down, Herzog was preoccu-
pied with putting the finishing touches on his memoir, L'Autre Annapurna. When that
book appeared in 1998, however, the passages devoted to the famous expedition—so
oddly at variance here and there with Herzog's first telling in Annapurna —only
stirred the flames anew.
Reaction to the topic fell out along political lines. Among major newspapers and
magazines, only the right-wing Le Figaro gave it a rave review. That newspaper, the
same with which Devies and Herzog had negotiated their 1950 exclusive, hailed “this
witty and modest account,” which was “not a biography; simply a meditation, free
of grandiloquence, on an exceptional life.” Buttressing the review were two sidebars
hailing Herzog himself. One, by Jean D'Ormesson, saluted “our Lindbergh, our Red-
ford, our Senna. Children are avid to see him; men fall at his knees.” “He was a hero,”
D'Ormesson went on. “He was a great man. He was a marvellous friend.”
In contrast, the left-wing press had a field day ridiculing the memoir. Libération
mocked Herzog's name-dropping by simply quoting it. A gossip column in Le
Faucigny reported the dinner chat of Pierre Mazeaud, one of the great alpinists of
Herzog's generation and himself politically minded: “He sent me the topic, with a ded-
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