Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
haps he felt his friend had let personal ambition get the better of his judgment. Wheth-
er other peers—including the school's director, the premier alpinist Jean Franco—were
of like mind has escaped the record. (All mention of this debate on the night of April
28, 1950, was expunged from Lachenal's
Carnets
published six years later.)
The posthumous censoring of Lachenal's diary is so extreme that it cannot be ex-
plained simply as stemming from a concern that Lachenal's version might contradict
Herzog's. Many of the most vivid vignettes having to do with native peoples have been
excised. One day Lachenal attends a funeral of another young native girl, at the cul-
mination of which a priest cuts open her corpse “from the vagina to the breasts”; ex-
tracts, Lachenal thinks, her liver; then sews the body closed again before burning it on
a pyre. In a remote village, the sahibs are offered girls for four rupees apiece. When
they turn down the proposition (mainly, Lachenal indicates, “because these were very
dirty Tibetans”), the locals offer them young boys. Both scenes were left out of the
Carnets
as originally published.
One might argue that such raw vignettes would have been routinely excised by
publishers in the 1950s. Yet it is not merely such shocking episodes as the sahibs
being offered children for sex that were censored in the
Carnets.
Most of the common
fleshly details that underline the human vulnerability of the teammates—their boils
and headaches, their diarrhea and vomiting—were expunged as well. Knights of the
sky do not suffer from diarrhea. And any hint of interpersonal conflict, such as Lachen-
al's quarrel with Rébuffat over the Grandes Jorasses, was similarly left out.
On the typescript of the diary that Michel Guérin rescued from oblivion appear the
marginal jottings of Lucien Devies and Maurice Herzog. Most of the excision marks
bear Devies's hand. The final pruning and rearranging were done by Gérard Herzog,
who was a professional editor.
When the unexpurgated
Carnets
appeared in 1996, journalists demanded of
Maurice Herzog an explanation of the censoring that took place four decades before.
“If none of those passages were published,” he told
Montagnes
magazine, “it's because
they didn't interest the editors.”
One passage “the editors” did not suppress gives the lie to Rébuffat's intuition that
he was the only married team member to miss his wife. On May 16, nearly seven
weeks gone from France, Lachenal paused beside a pretty stream in a calcite gorge. “I
filled my hand with water, looked at it carefully, then threw it back into the torrent,
telling it to evaporate and transport itself in a cloud all the way to Praz where this bit
of water might fall on the head of my wife.”
By May 14, however, such private, happy moments were few and far between for
the beleaguered team. They had spent most of those seven weeks trying to get to
