Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
knew that side, but not the public, and so it came as a great surprise to learn, with the
publication of Ballu's biography in 1996, just how disenchanted Rébuffat had been on
Annapurna.
In April 1999, pursuing the “other Annapurnas” that Michel Guérin's confidences
had alerted me to, I met Françoise Rébuffat, Gaston's widow, in Paris. Rébuffat had died
in 1985, a rare male victim of breast cancer, after an agonizing deterioration stretched
over ten years. Françoise had remarried, but she continued to guard her husband's leg-
acy with a fierce loyalty.
In her chic apartment high above Montparnasse, I encountered an elegant and
forceful woman of seventy-five. Françoise had met Gaston rather improbably one day
in 1946 in Chamonix, in the
salon de thé
of the Hôtel des Alpes, a favorite hangout of
both climbing guides and modish tourists that doubled as a dance parlor. The daughter
of an architect from the Côte d'Azur, studying fashion at an elite school, she was on
holiday with her friends. At twenty-two, Françoise was a great beauty.
“I'd like to meet a mountain guide sometime,” she impulsively told her friends.
One of them pointed out the tall, angular Rébuffat, who was dancing with a Dior
model. “That's one there,” she said.
Françoise thought her friends were teasing her, the
méditerrannéenne
ignorant
of the mountains. In her conception, a guide would be dressed in ragged trousers,
wearing hobnailed boots, his visage leathery with exposure to sun and wind, sporting
perhaps a fine mustache—not that young man in elegant tweeds with his face ex-
pressive of urbane character. “That one,” she said with a laugh, “he must be a
guide
d'opérette
”—a vapid know-it-all.
Thus Françoise and Gaston met, fell in love, and married. He took her climbing; she
introduced him to her world of artists and aristocrats and fine restaurants.
As we talked on in her Paris apartment, and later, as I read a moving unpublished
memoir Françoise had written about her husband after his death, I realized that despite
the social inequality in their upbringings, theirs had been that rare union of two souls
as devoted to one another thirty years after they met as when they had first plunged
into the delirium of courtship, a pair who had never begun to fall out of love.
As he headed off to Annapurna at the end of March 1950, Gaston was twenty-eight
years old, Françoise twenty-six. She had given birth to a daughter, Frédérique, two
years before. Supporting the couple with his earnings as guide, Gaston had begun, if
rather tentatively, to realize his ambitions as a writer. In 1946 he had published a book
for aspiring climbers called
L'Apprenti Montagnard;
in 1949, a picture book about the
Calanques.
