June 3 - True Summit - page 11

team—carefully combed the text. Among the three of them, they pruned Lachenal's
account of every scrap of critical, sardonic, or embittered commentary the guide had
penned. The published Carnets du Vertige was a sanitized, expurgated whitewash.
In Chamonix, Michel had befriended Lachenal's son, Jean-Claude, who for decades
had held the original manuscript that his father had written. Though furious at
Herzog's intercession, Jean-Claude was deeply torn in his feelings, for on Lachenal's
death, Herzog had assumed the role of tuteur to the bereaved family—an official post
mandated by French law. The same man who betrayed his father's truth took Jean-
Claude and his brother on many a childhood forest walk and supervised their rocky
passage through a series of schools.
After years of friendship and discussion, Michel had persuaded Jean-Claude to let
him publish an unexpurgated version of the Carnets. The topic would be out in a few
months; already it was causing a stir in mountaineering circles. At the same time,
journalist Yves Ballu was about to publish the first biography of Rébuffat, to be called
Gaston Rébuffat: Une Vie pour la Montagne ( Gaston Rébuffat: A Life for the Moun-
tains ). Ballu had received the full cooperation of Rébuffat's widow, Françoise, who had
enjoined her husband not to write about Annapurna in his lifetime. In particular, Ballu
would benefit from Gaston's long and acerbic letters to Françoise from the expedition,
and from private notes and marginal commentaries he had jotted down in subsequent
years.
The upshot of Rébuffat's and Lachenal's uncensored commentaries, Michel told me,
was to paint an utterly different picture of the 1950 expedition from Herzog's. Accord-
ing to Lachenal and Rébuffat, the team had been frequently and rancorously divided;
Herzog's leadership had been capricious and at times inept; and the whole summit ef-
fort and desperate retreat lay shrouded in a central mystery.
Herzog himself, now the father figure of French mountaineering, was about to un-
dergo a scrutiny that would deeply trouble his old age. The grand fête of French cel-
ebration, so long anticipated, on June 3, 2000—the fiftieth anniversary of the sum-
mit—might turn instead into an agon of reappraisal. As the only survivor among the
six principal climbers, Herzog would have every chance to get in the last word. But
would his most eloquent protestations silence the posthumous oracles of Rébuffat and
Lachenal?
Among the cognoscenti of French mountaineering, Michel told me, there had long
been murmurs and doubts about Annapurna; but few if any of these hints had leaked
abroad. Certainly before this evening I had never heard a gainsaying word about
Herzog's Annapurna.