Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Terray would devote an inordinate effort after he became a guide and famous climber
to proving to his distant father that he had after all amounted to something.
After the war broke out, Terray joined Jeunesse et Montagne, in whose ranks, in
1942, he met Rébuffat. To Terray's astonishment, this tall, craggy Marseillais had be-
come at the same age a mountaineer even more ambitious than himself. They talked of
wild projects, then climbed together, their efforts culminating in the perilous but bril-
liant first ascent of the Col du Caïman.
It would have been logical had Terray and Rébuffat formed the perfect partnership
that Terray later formed with Lachenal. Yet temperamentally, the men were not a good
match, and that disparity emerged on snow and rock. “The climbs we did together,”
Terray reflected in 1961, “. . . were quite good for those days but not really exception-
al . . . [E]ven taking into account poor conditions and equipment our times were quite
slow.”
Rébuffat “was an extremely good rock climber,” Terray later wrote.
By contrast, however, he was deficient in some of the qualities which distinguish the moun-
taineer from the climber, such as a sense of direction and ease of movement on mixed
ground and snow and ice. I was completely his opposite. I was rather nervous and lacking in
confidence and, apart from occasional flashes, a very mediocre rock climber. But I had an un-
usual sense of direction and was completely at my ease on all types of high mountain ter-
rain.
Quixotically, instead of forming the ideal
cordée,
or rope team, during the middle
years of the war, Rébuffat and Terray bought a farm together in Les Houches, a hamlet
just down the Arve valley from Chamonix. Their bizarre experiment in pastoralism
was an attempt, as Terray put it, “to find a way of living in the mountains, so that I
could continue climbing and skiing.” But Rébuffat had had, since childhood, a mortal
fear of cows. In addition, both men were far too restless to settle down to the grinding
discipline of farm life. The agricultural lark ended in 1944.
A concomitant factor was that in the meantime, Terray had fallen in love with
a teacher from Saint-Gervais-les-Bains. Marianne was “very blonde, with porcelain-
blue eyes . . . young and pretty . . . [with] a taste for things elegant and intellectual.”
The last sort of life she wanted was to become a farmer's wife. In love herself, Mari-
anne agreed to marry Lionel in 1942, but from their wedding on, the ménage at Les
Houches was doomed.
Terray scraped a living out of teaching winters in the ski school at Les Houches, and
during the last year of the war he performed his daring jaunts of mountain warfare
as a member of the Compagnie Stéphane. Just like Rébuffat, however, Terray had set
