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good they'll have done themselves when they're walking on crutches like your cousin
René!”
Such vehement opposition only reinforced the young Lionel's interest in climbing.
When he was twelve, his mother took him for the school holidays to Chamonix. The
boy was stunned by his first close encounter with really big mountains, as opposed to
the limestone préalpes near Grenoble. One of his friends, the housekeeper's daughter,
Georgette, three or four years Lionel's elder, belonged to a hiking club. The ambitious
young montagnard talked Georgette into a secret attempt on the Dent Gérard, a fairly
serious climb in the Vercors. “Perhaps I have never come as close to death as I did on
that day,” recalled Terray at the age of forty, after two decades of extreme climbing all
over the world. On the crux of this desperate ascent, Lionel used his rope to haul Ge-
orgette bodily up a pitch he had just almost fallen off himself, succeeding “despite the
sobs and protests of my half-suffocated companion.”
At boarding school, Terray became a champion skier, though in his own estimation,
“I was a very bad student. . . . [T]he trouble came from a complete incapacity to con-
centrate: I was at the school physically, but my mind could not succeed in settling
there.” Addicted to a vigorous outdoor life, Lionel grew up strong, rugged, almost
burly. Though a family legend reported that as a baby he had such a full head of hair
that his parents had to call in a barber at the age of four days, by the time he was
twenty-one he was going bald. By late adolescence, Lionel had a round, powerful coun-
tenance and a piercing gaze; he was quite handsome, with a certain Italianate sensual-
ity about his mouth and eyes.
Having survived his ordeal on the Dent Gérard, Lionel more sensibly hired a guide
on his next trip to Chamonix. There followed some stiff classic climbs, including the
traverse of the Grépon. By now, his parents had separated, and his mother had moved
to Chamonix, where she owned a small chalet. Lionel was installed in a boarding school
in town, but he devoted all his efforts to skiing and climbing. His schoolwork had been
so poor that he had to repeat a year, and he knew the chances were all but nil of his ever
gaining his baccalauréat. The turning point came when he was invited to the French
national ski championships in the Pyrenees in the middle of the school term. The “ju-
venile prison” in which he was incarcerated refused to give Lionel leave, so he went to
the championships anyway, knowing the school would expel him.
At this point in Terray's life, his father in effect disowned him. Writing in maturity,
Lionel could afford to treat this breach with irony: [M]y father, by now completely dis-
pirited at having engendered such a monster, seemed not to take much further interest
in my fate.” At the time, however, his father's disdain sorely cost the young man, and
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