Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
There was something claustrophobic and oppressive about the place. It was easy to
picture the erstwhile grandeur of these upper-class rooms, and their decay was all the
more wistful for that. It was hard to imagine the blithe mountaineer living even tem-
porarily in such squalor.
We were about to go, when Michel, poking through another closet, came across a
bulging green cardboard folder. A piece of adhesive tape had been stuck to it, on which,
in blue ink, someone had written:
COURSES EXPLOR
BRESIL ATEURS
DRAME Mt BLANC
“That's Terray's handwriting,” said Michel, as he opened the folder. I peered over his
shoulder, as he leafed through page after page of carefully scrawled manuscript. “And
that's his handwriting too,” Michel murmured.
A moment later, he let out a curse under his breath. “It's the manuscript of
Les Con-
quérants,
” he said softly.
Later, back in Chamonix, we studied this lost relic carefully. I went through page
after page of the published
Conquérants,
collating it with the handwritten manuscript.
With growing elation, I said to Michel, “Hardly a word has been changed. It's word for
word what Gallimard published. So much for Roger Nimier!”
Michel ultimately returned the manuscript to Marianne, who was delighted to have
it. And we too were delighted. In a moment's accidental discovery, defying his detract-
ors, we had restored the authorship of the topic we both regarded as the inest climbing
autobiography ever written to the man who not only had performed all those great
deeds in the mountains, but had found, with no help from another, the right words to
memorialize them.
T
WO YEARS BEFORE,
on my first visit to Chamonix, I had sought out Terray's grave in
the cemetery. I found it just inside the gates, marked by an unshaped slab of brownish
granite with a wooden plaque bolted to the stone. The inscription was even more lac-
onic than Lachenal's, declaring only
LIONEL TERRAY
1921 + 1965
Above the name dangled a tiny bronze Christ. The earth covering Terray's coffin ran
riot with pansies and forget-me-nots.
