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who had pioneered the Walker in 1938. At the time, both Terray and Lachenal were
twenty-four years old.
If Rébuffat succeeded, Terray tentatively mused, he might be interested in having a
crack at the Walker himself. “But the great problem is to find someone to go with . . .
would you be interested?”
Lachenal was dizzied by the idea. “Are you kidding? The Walker's my dream. But
do you think I'm up to it? I haven't done much yet.”
“You may not have done much, but I've been watching you these last two days.
You're a natural, it's enough to make anybody jealous. Done. If they get up, we'll have
a shot.”
In that moment, the partnership was forged.
L
IONEL
T
ERRAY WAS BORN IN
1921, the same year as Rébuffat and Lachenal, in Grenoble.
His parents were
grands bourgeois
with instinctively aristocratic tastes. Terray's father
had started a chemical engineering business in Brazil, grown modestly rich, and at the
age of forty chucked his job in industry for a career in medicine. Terray's mother had
studied painting and made some ambitious horseback trips into the Brazilian wilder-
ness.
The family house, a ramshackle three-story château in the oldest part of Grenoble,
backed up against the limestone spur at whose foot the town spreads. It made a halcyon
playground for young Lionel. “I grew there almost without constraint,” he wrote
in 1961, “running through the woods, clambering the rocks, trapping rabbits, foxes,
and rats, shooting blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows and sparrowhawks.” Using guns and
knives his parents had brought back from Brazil, Lionel played cowboys and Indi-
ans with his schoolmates in the woods. With one friend, Terray skinned the rats he
had trapped, dried and tanned the hides, then sewed them into “picturesque costumes
which, we hoped, resembled those of Attila's Huns.”
Terray's parents had been avid skiers, his father the first Frenchman to master the
telemark turn. But when Lionel showed an interest in climbing, they voiced a with-
ering disapproval. “It's a stupid sport,” said his mother, “which consists of dragging
yourself up rocks with your hands, feet and teeth!” His father inveighed, “A man must
be completely crazy to wear himself out climbing a mountain, at the risk of breaking
his neck, when there isn't even a hundred franc note to be picked up on the summit.”
A cousin of Terray's had been crippled in a climbing accident. His parents held up
this tragedy as a lesson for their son. Seeing German students hung with gear in the
streets of Grenoble, Terray
père
would sneer, “Take a good look at those idiots. A lot of
