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as if to simulate a wind-blown banner on an all but windless day. (It is possible that
Herzog is instead holding the flag to keep it from flapping in the wind.)
Buffet had asked Herzog point-blank if he had made the summit. “He answered,
'There is a polemic of doubt about the 1960 Chinese expedition to the north side of
Everest. They can produce no evidence they reached the summit. People come to me
and ask me if it was true that we made the summit. My answer is, “If one climber says
he made the summit, you have to believe him.” ' ”
Buffet paused, then said, “I thought this was a strange answer.
“Some people in Chamonix,” Buffet went on, “tell a story of meeting Lachenal one
day in 1954 or '55, when he was very drunk, and he admitted he hadn't been to the
summit.”
Buffet went so far as to play out a purely speculative scenario for me, which he said
certain observers had toyed with: “Lachenal wants to turn around, Herzog does not.
At last Herzog agrees to turn around, if Lachenal will agree to say they'd been to the
summit.”
Jean-Michel Asselin, editor of
Vertical
, had interviewed Rébuffat extensively during
the 1980s. Asselin told me, “When Rébuffat spoke of the summit, he didn't say that
Lachenal and Herzog hadn't made the top. But when he talked about it, he had a cer-
tain irony about his look.”
Françoise Rébuffat, on the other hand, insisted that Gaston had never doubted that
his friends had reached the summit. And Yves Ballu countered Asselin by saying,
“Rébuffat gave me no reason to doubt the summit. This is too serious a question to
base the answer on a grimace.”
In the 1996 controversy provoked by the publication of Ballu's biography of
Rébuffat and Guérin's edition of Lachenal's diary, the question of the summit burst to
the fore. Herzog countered with an air of patient exasperation. To
Le Monde
's query
about the summit photo, he answered, “Because of the perspective, the photo gives the
impression that above us there was a snow arête. In fact, that 'arête' only reached to
my waist. We could not climb to the very crest of that ridge, which was in truth a cor-
nice. But we were indubitably on the summit.”
To cast light on the question,
Montagnes
published for the first time all five black-
and-white photos purportedly taken on the summit. By themselves, they are incon-
clusive. Yet they raise other interesting points of debate. Four of the photos were taken
of Herzog by Lachenal, using Herzog's Foca camera. Two (including the famous image)
show Herzog hoisting the French flag; one, the CAF flag; and the fourth, the banner of
Kléber-Colombes. The fifth photo Herzog took of Lachenal. It is badly out of focus, but
in it Lachenal sits slumped against a rock in a decidedly unvictorious posture.
