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as his highest ambition becoming a Chamonix guide. His birthplace of Grenoble was
not as glaring a stigma as Rébuffat's hailing from Marseille, but there was no ques-
tion Terray was a “foreigner.” Yet his skill and tenacity won out. Shortly after the war,
and shortly after he met Lachenal, Terray was accepted into the elite fraternity of the
Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix.
L
ACHENAL GREW UP IN
A
NNECY
, the winsome lakefront French village south of Geneva. If
Terray's parents had become
grands bourgeois
through industrial success, Lachenal's
remained
petits bourgeois
through and through. Sober, frugal, and conservative, they
ran an old-fashioned grocery store on a busy Annecy street. From childhood on, Louis
felt the pinch of near-poverty.
Temperamentally, he was the opposite of his parents. Intensely curious, he was both
an avid reader and a restless adventurer. The driven impatience that became the hall-
mark of his climbing stamped his spirit from his earliest years. At a tender age, he
realized he was addicted to risk. The passion first took the form of a systematic cam-
paign, with Louis's best friend, to sneak without paying into every movie theater in
Annecy. Each theater required a different technique. The thrill was the chance of get-
ting caught. Once the boys had succeeded in sneaking in, Louis would laugh with un-
containable joy. Yet in truth, he hated movies. As soon as the first scenes came on the
screen, he would tell his friend, “Come on, let's go, it's over.”
In adulthood, Lachenal wrote memorably about the appeal of risk:
Definition: a taste for risk is inborn and later made rational. For certain men, it is a neces-
sity. It is the desire to perfect oneself, to raise oneself, to attain an ideal. It implies a taste for
responsibility. Mastery of oneself and conquest of fear.
Louis grew up as a choirboy and, starting at thirteen, as a scout; yet he was at the
same time not far from what in America would be called a juvenile delinquent. While
still young, he acquired a taste for the sharp cider of Savoie, known as
biscantin
in the
local patois. “Biscante” became Lachenal's lifelong nickname, the moniker by which
his teammates addressed him on Annapurna.
From his first hikes with fellow scouts onward, Louis was obsessed with mountains.
When he cornered an elder who had real climbing experience, he would bombard
him with earnest questions: Was Whymper a guide? Was Lochmatter? Were there no
French guides? What was the name of the mountain in this photograph? How high?
On a small crag overlooking Annecy, Lachenal and a few chums taught themselves
to climb. For a rope, they borrowed the halyard with which their scout troop hoisted its
flag; for shoes, they wore “sneakers,” soled with woven cord rather than rubber. From
