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of his life, Rébuffat would sing the praises of the brotherhood of the rope as no moun-
taineer before him had ever done. Comradeship would center his life, and in 1950, on
his greatest adventure, setting off for the Himalaya with his good friends Terray and
Lachenal, he hoped to distill the elixir of shared toil and commitment.
Gaston grew up tall and lean, with a great bushy crown of dark hair brushed back
from his forehead and a famously craggy face: all but concave, the jutting chin triangu-
lating his features, the full eyebrows guarding his mountain squint, a cigarette (later a
pipe) often clenched between his lips in mid-climb. On Annapurna, he was a full head
taller than any of his teammates.
Not until he was fifteen, on a long hike out of Briançon, did the young wanderer
discover the Mont Blanc massif. At sixteen, he quit school to take a menial job, joined
the Haute-Provence section of the CAF, and befriended his first climbing partner, a
modestly talented alpinist eight years his senior named Henry Moulin. With Moulin,
he made his first ascents of real mountains. On top of his first major summit, during
a traverse of the Ecrins, west of Briançon, he was transported. “What happiness!” he
wrote later. “My dream realized. I'd done the Ecrins. Was it possible? . . . My first great
summit. And now, may many others follow.”
It was then, in late adolescence, that Gaston conceived as his ambition to become a
member of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, the most prestigious fraternity in
mountaineering. That goal, as he knew, amounted to an all-but-impossible fantasy for
a boy from the seashore.
The ancient village at the headwaters of the Arve, clinging to its narrow valley far
beneath the soaring glaciers and aiguilles of the Mont Blanc massif, was, despite its
role even in the 1930s as a world-renowned resort, one of the more xenophobic towns
in France. Chamonix fiercely guarded its claim to have been the birthplace of moun-
taineering, from which the first ascent of Mont Blanc by Paccard and Balmat in 1786
had unfolded. The proudest office one could hold in the town was to be a mountain
guide. Father passed down his expertise to son: certain families, such as the Simonds,
the Charlets, the Ravanels, counted dozens of guides among their number. (In the
Chamonix cemetery, the memorial to guides killed in the mountains names thirteen
Simonds who lost their lives between 1866 and 1987.)
Only once before, in the case of Roger Frison-Roche (later to write the bestselling
novel, First on the Rope ), had the company of guides relaxed its vigilance and admitted
an “outsider.” The idea of a first-class mountaineer hailing from Marseille, however,
would have seemed to most Chamoniards a rich joke.
Yet by 1940, at age nineteen, Rébuffat had indeed become a first-class climber. His
hallmark was balance and grace on rock. He seemed to flow effortlessly up cliffs where
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