Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Herzog answered. “Maybe he thought, 'There's a leader, I must follow him, but if I
follow him, in a sense I'm doing something banal.' ”
By 1998, Herzog was still adopting the stance that the controversy was beneath
him, too trivial to disturb him. Yet the full vexation of the reexamination of An-
napurna burst out in a tirade at the end of his interview with Benoît Heimermann,
where the conspiracy theory emerged full-blown.
Asked about Jean-Claude Lachenal, Herzog answered, “It's not that he wasn't in-
telligent [as a boy], but that he was a little crazy. . . . He was the one who was at the
bottom of this 'affair.' He thought that the diary of his father had some huge value,
to the point where he transported it to Switzerland. We're not talking about a work of
art.
“What's more, Lachenal had no pretensions in this area. He knew well that he was
incapable of writing. He asked I don't know how many people to help him write a book.
Finally, it was my brother who wrote up
Carnets du Vertige
for him. He was very
happy with the result.
“Afterwards, it was his son who invented this story of manipulation, because he
desperately wanted to place his father as Number One. The problem is that Louis
Lachenal wasn't Number One. After that, Michel Guérin published this story, append-
ing the diary itself. . . . It didn't work.
“So Jean-Claude arranged with Claude Francillon of
Le Monde
to launch this 'af-
fair.' I don't know why, but Francillon seems to have been taken in by Jean-Claude.”
In 1998, Foutharkey, one of the few surviving Sherpas from the 1950 expedition,
came to Paris. With press in attendance, Herzog briefly greeted the man, whom he had
not seen in forty-eight years. Just afterward, Bernard George, filming a documentary
about Annapurna, interviewed the Sherpa. Through an interpreter, the soft-spoken
Foutharkey contrasted his people's views of Herzog and of Sir Edmund Hillary, who
had devoted his post-Everest life to building schools and hospitals for the Sherpas.
“Hillary is a hero in Nepal, but Herzog, I don't think so. . . . I carried this man on my
back until I could taste the blood in my mouth, and today he has only five minutes for
me. It's too bad for him.”
I
N
M
AY
1997, I
WENT TO
C
HAMONIX
to begin my investigation of the complex and am-
biguous story Annapurna had recently become. The first day, I walked through the
cemetery. Finding Lachenal's plain granite headstone with its taciturn inscription, I
stood there for long moments.
Thirty-four years earlier, after reading
Conquistadors of the Useless,
I had chosen
the man who lay buried at my feet not simply as my hero, but as the climber with