by Brad Matsen
Cousteau’s family in Sanary after the war. (Left to right) Simone, Philippe, Jacques, nephew Jean-Pierre, Jean-Michel, sister-in-law Fernande, niece Françoise, and Cousteau’s mother, Elizabeth (PRIVATE COLLECTION)
Though Cousteau, Tailliez, and Dumas would much rather have been training divers to thoroughly explore the Mediterranean with Aqua-Lungs, the first assignment of the group was clearing French harbors that were littered with mines, shipwrecks, and unexploded munitions. For a year, they investigated wrecks and cleared the sea lanes. It quickly became obvious that a diver with an Aqua-Lung could accomplish far more than a hard-hat diver in a given time, simply because he could find the mines faster. They invented an underwater sled that could carry a diver and be towed at 6 knots behind their boat. With it, they cleared the harbor at Sète of mines in a little over a month, a job that would have taken conventional divers four or five times longer.
When demolitions work tapered off, Cousteau led an inland diving expedition to the village of Vaucluse near Avignon, where a legendary spring emerges from the base of a 600-foot limestone cliff. The Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, memorialized in the fourteenth century by the poet Petrarch and more recently by the Bard of Provence, Frédéric Mistral, was one of the world’s great hydrological mysteries. No one had been able to explain why a calm watery cavern turned into a gushing torrent spewing millions of gallons of water into the Sorgue River for five weeks every spring. Hard-hat divers had tried and failed to find the source of the celebrated fountain, which one puzzled scientist called “the most exasperating enigma of subterranean hydraulics.” Cousteau knew that good publicity about divers using the revolutionary Aqua-Lung made the acquisition of equipment, boats, and supplies from the navy much easier. If he, Tailliez, and Dumas could solve the thousands-year-old mystery of the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, their discovery would make sensational news and the navy would become even more supportive of the Undersea Research Group.
Before asking the navy for permission to go to Vaucluse, Les Mousquemers carefully evaluated the risk of a dive into a dark, underground river. Tailliez drew up a list of seven specific dangers:
There was the instinctive repugnance to diving underground. There was the cold, for the water in the spring was no more than twelve degrees centigrade. There was the darkness, which our flashlights could pierce but feebly—if they did not fail altogether. The rope might part, leaving us to extricate ourselves from an uncharted maze. There might be a fall of rock. There might be suction or underground currents might pin us in some corner. And, finally, there was the danger of intoxication of great depths.
“I despise danger,” Cousteau said. “I am not a thrill seeker but an explorer who intends to return myself and my men safely from every dive I make.”
Before dawn on August 27, they left Toulon in one of their trucks carrying the new rubber diving suits with which they had been experimenting, four Aqua-Lungs loaded the night before with air from a new compressor, masks, fins, cameras, and coils of mountaineering rope. Using the reports from the earlier hard-hat attempts, which had reached a depth of 120 feet, they planned their dive as though they would be climbing a mountain instead of descending down a sloping tunnel filled with water.
A crowd of villagers, caving experts, and Simone Cousteau looked on from the rocky lip of the crater. Simone appeared none too happy about the dive into a dark cave, standing with her arms folded across her chest glaring at her husband as he lowered the weighted end of a 400-foot guide rope from a canoe. The weight stopped at the 50-foot mark. One of the group’s newly trained petty officer divers plunged into the water wearing an Aqua-Lung but not a diving suit and freed the weight, which had snagged on a triangular rock that almost completely blocked the tunnel. He returned to the surface shivering uncontrollably. The guide rope had stuck again at 90 feet.
Cousteau and Dumas, dressed in heavy woolen underwear, squirmed into their new diving suits. Even during the warmest months, Les Mousquemers returned from long dives at depths over 60 feet in the early stages of hypothermia. They tried coating themselves with grease, which turned out to be worse than nothing at all. Most of the grease quickly washed away, leaving a thin coating of oil that increased the loss of body heat. If they could have injected the grease under their skin it would have worked fine, but otherwise, they needed a second skin. They sewed sheets of vulcanized rubber into a full-body suit, but discovered that the air trapped inside it produced uncontrollable buoyancy as the pressure changed during a descent or ascent. They spent most of their time underwater fighting the buoyancy or hanging upside down when all the air rushed to the legs of their suits. Just before the dive into the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, they figured out how to maintain a constant volume of air inside their suits with escape valves at their neck, wrists, and ankles. They could replace lost air with exhalation of breath under the edges of a mask that vented into the suit.
Cousteau and Dumas roped up like mountain climbers, with a 30-foot length between them, and checked each other’s air valves and equipment. Standing on the lip of the crater, they were loaded down like pack animals, each with three air cylinders, foot fins, dagger, and two large waterproof flashlights. Dumas wore a red-colored face mask, Cousteau blue, so their surface team could quickly identify each man. Cousteau carried 300 feet of line, coiled in three pieces. When they reached the end of the weighted guide rope, he would pay out his coils as they entered what they assumed would be another chamber of the cave. Dumas carried a small cylinder and regulator as an emergency air supply, and an alpinist’s ice ax.
They went over the code they had worked out for signaling Maurice Fargues, who was in charge of tending the rope on the surface. One tug on the rope meant tighten the rope to clear a snag. Three tugs meant pay out more line. Six tugs meant pull us up as quickly as possible. Underwater, Cousteau wore a mouthpiece he had invented through which he could shout brief commands to Dumas, who wore a regular mouthpiece but could only respond with nods of his head and hand signals.
Cousteau and Dumas struggled into the water under their heavy equipment, and felt the now familiar relief as buoyancy made them weightless. They bobbed on the surface for a minute, made final checks of their regulator valves, and eyed the crowd on the lip of the crater above them, which had swollen to more than a hundred curious people. In the front rank stood a young, black-clad priest, whom Dumas and Cousteau assumed had arrived to oversee their departures if the worst happened.
The key to understanding the annual gusher from the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, hydrologists had told them, was finding an inner chamber of air in which pressure could build up to discharge the gusher explosively in the spring. The goal of the first descent was to find the point at which the tunnel hit bottom and began rising to an inner air chamber. Cousteau and Dumas dropped into a narrowing tunnel about 16 feet in diameter, traveling along a rock face sloping downward at a 30-degree angle. Fifty feet down, they found the boulder on which the guide rope had snagged, and slipped past it through an opening barely big enough to accommodate a man wearing an Aqua-Lung.
Cousteau and Dumas had not imagined the frightening darkness into which they descended as they passed the boulder. The faint green blip of the entrance to the tunnel disappeared entirely. The water contained no diatoms or plankton, which in the ocean reflect the beams of flashlights; here in the cave their lights illuminated only coin-size patches of the wall down which they crawled. Cousteau glanced above him and saw that Dumas was braking his own descent with his feet to maintain his distance on the rope, but in doing so he was kicking big chunks of limestone downward.
At 90 feet, Cousteau breathed easier when he found the pig-iron weight of the guide rope resting on a ledge, right where it was supposed to be. He had learned he was more susceptible to the rapture of the deep than heavier, less leanly muscled men, and instantly recognized the beginning of its fuzzy embrace. Cousteau fought through the narcosis, remembered that he was supposed to do something with the pig-iron weight, and kicked it off the ledge with his heel. He
did not know he had lost the coils of ropes on his arm, didn’t know that he had failed to tug the line three times to ask for slack to allow the guide rope to sink deeper, and had forgotten even that Dumas was 30 feet up, which would have explained the irritating rocks pelting him from above.
Cousteau had a blinding headache, but he continued to descend. A minute later, he landed standing up on what seemed to be the floor of the cave. Rocks, dirt, and some debris that looked man-made surrounded his feet. He checked his depth. One hundred and fifty feet, but the gauge was full of water. That had to be wrong, Cousteau thought. They were at least 200 feet beneath the surface, and 300 feet from the mouth of the slanting tunnel. Cousteau followed his bubbles streaming upward but not into the shaft through which they had just descended. He was apparently at an elbow in the tunnel. Still in the tunnel, Dumas struggled with his suit, which had ruptured and was filling with water. He looked like a partially inflated balloon.
Cousteau’s rapture suddenly filled him with the urgency to explore the upward shaft, which might lead to the solution of the mystery of the fountain. He shouted through his vocalizer mouthpiece, telling Dumas to stay at the rope while he swam away and up to look for the shaft. Dumas was woozy, deep into narcosis. He thought Cousteau was shouting at him because he needed air from the emergency Aqua-Lung, and lunged down into the darkness after him. Now both divers had left the guide rope, their only hope for getting to the surface because they could no longer follow their bubbles to the surface in the terrifying darkness of the cave.
Cousteau snapped back to sanity for a moment. He saw the faint light from a flashlight, swam toward it, and crashed into Dumas, who was limp and barely conscious. Cousteau looked into Didi’s mask and saw his eyes rolled back into his head. Dumas woke, seized Cousteau by the wrist, and pulled him into a bear hug. Cousteau twisted free, and frantically swept the beam of his flashlight over the floor of the cavern. There was no current, so they had remained near the pig-iron anchor of the guide rope, and there it was. Cousteau reached into the darkness, grabbed Dumas, and saw with horror that Didi’s jaw was slack. His mouthpiece had slipped from his mouth. Cousteau jammed the mouthpiece back in, grabbed the rope that still tied the two of them together, and started clawing his way upward, towing Dumas in his heavy, waterlogged suit behind him. He started climbing up the rope hand over hand, but on the surface, Fargues interpreted the first three tugs as a call for more slack on the guide rope. To Cousteau’s horror, he felt the rope fall. When it stopped falling, he tried to climb again. More slack came down. Cousteau scrambled up the steep slope of the tunnel wall, thinking it was his only hope. Only then did he remember that six tugs on the rope meant pull everything up. Cousteau tugged six times, felt tension on the rope, then slack. Its 400-foot length was snagged by friction on the tunnel walls. The emergency signal was not getting through to Fargues. He looked down at Dumas hanging like a bloated sack beneath him, and pulled out his knife to cut himself free of his best friend, who was certainly dead. As his knife touched the rope tying him to Didi, Cousteau was yanked firmly upward by the guide rope. He put his dagger away and hung on for the sixty seconds it took to return to the world of light.
Five minutes into the dive, when Cousteau and Dumas had reached the elbow in the tunnel, Simone Cousteau had seen the bubbles stop gurgling to the surface. She could not stand to watch the still water, and fled to the village, where she ducked into a cafe and ordered a brandy. Soon after she sat down, a man running from the direction of the fountain was crying out that one of the divers had drowned. Simone grabbed the man as he passed. What color was the mask of the dead man? Red, the man replied. Cousteau’s mask was blue. Simone felt the weight of mortal dread lift but only for a moment. The man she loved second only to her husband was dead. Dazed, she staggered back up the path to the base of the cliff to face the horrible truth. There she received one of the most wonderful gifts of her life. Both Cousteau and Dumas stood warming themselves over a barrel of burning gasoline, gesturing wearily to Tailliez and the others.
Later that day, Tailliez and Guy Morandière, who had been with the group since the beginning, descended into the fountain wearing only long underwear and lightweight belts so they would remain positively buoyant. At 120 feet, both divers felt the unmistakable onset of nitrogen narcosis and aborted their descent. After Tailliez signaled with six tugs, Morandière watched in horror as his partner whipped out his dagger and started slashing at the rope. Morandière swam under Tailliez, grabbed his ankles, and kicked for the dim green opening above them. On the surface, the crowd gasped when they saw Tailliez break water surrounded by a cloud of blood. In his rapture, imagining that he was entangled in the guide rope, Tailliez had slashed at it and in the process cut the fingers of his hand to the bone.
The disasters in the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse should not have happened, the divers concluded on the drive back to Toulon. They were underwater nowhere near long enough to have been stricken with nitrogen narcosis. They wondered if somehow the clear, still water in the cavern had created different pressures on their bodies than the sea. Dumas suggested that perhaps they weren’t narced at all, but rather had suffered from some unknown reaction to fear in the absolute darkness. Or maybe there was something wrong with the air they were breathing. The following day, they analyzed the remaining air in their cylinders, and discovered that it was contaminated with six times the amount of carbon monoxide in normal air. The carbon monoxide could have come from only one source: their new compressor. They fired it up, attached a tank for refilling, and saw that the air intake of the compressor was sucking in exhaust from the gasoline engine. Under the pressure of 5 atmospheres, the carbon monoxide would have killed all of them in twenty minutes.
A month after they failed to uncover the secret of the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, Les Mousquemers realized their far greater ambition to establish themselves as underwater cinematographers. In 1939, the French minister for arts and education had proposed the creation of an international event to celebrate motion pictures, naming the Mediterranean seaside resort town of Cannes as its site. This First International Film Festival, which would have been presided over by Louis Lumière, had been postponed until the autumn of 1946. It opened on September 20 for a two-week run, becoming the first major cultural event in postwar Europe.
Producers from a dozen countries presented twenty-three films, including Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend from the United States; Brief Encounter, by David Lean, from Britain; The Prize, by Alf Sjoberg, from Sweden; and Épaves, by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Frédéric Dumas, and Philippe Tailliez. The festival was more a film forum than a competition, because every film entered won a medal. Les Mousquemers, their families, and friends savored the gasps of the audience in the darkened theater watching men swim like fish as they explored shipwrecks that had never before been seen by human eyes. At the end of the festival, in the great hall of the Casino de Cannes, Épaves was awarded the special prize from the Center for the Arts, Literature, and the Cinema. Tailliez stood on the dais during the presentation looking like a slightly awkward sailor on shore leave, Dumas like a wild animal indoors for the first time. Cousteau, however, was beaming. He felt very much at home with the applause of the crowd and having all eyes focused on him but was far more thrilled by the possibility that he might really be able to make a living as an underwater cinematographer.
8
MENFISH
A WEEK AFTER Cousteau savored his triumph at Cannes, word reached him from Paris that his brother, Pierre-Antoine, had been arrested as a Nazi collaborator. During the war, Cousteau and PAC had chosen different sides, but they had never renounced each other. Their family bond meant more to them than national loyalty or the dismal business of doing whatever was necessary to survive and protect their wives and children. As a member of the resistance, Cousteau may not have agreed with PAC’s politics or his loyalties during the war, but he could not forget the beloved PAC who had made his early childhood bearable.
“He was my brother,”
Cousteau said twenty years later. “Nothing else mattered.”
As the American army massed at Chartres for the assault on Paris on August 17, 1944, PAC and his wife had rushed to the rue des Pyramides to join a truck convoy the Germans had organized to evacuate their most highly cooperative French collaborators. Already, broadcasts from radio stations in England included reports of in absentia death sentences for the most notorious French turncoats. The scene on the rue des Pyramides was chaotic amid rumors that resistance partisans were also assembling nearby to execute them en masse when the Allied army took the city. More than twenty thousand collaborators fled Paris that night. The Cousteaus set off with a small band determined to find refuge in Italy. At the Austrian-Italian border they changed course, fleeing into the Alps and eventually surrendering to American troops as a much better alternative than the Free French, who would have shot them on sight.
In the Allied prison camp at Landeck, PAC posed as a Pole to hide from visiting French officers, who had come to claim their traitors. He persuaded the American commanding officer of the camp to release Fernande to live free in a nearby village, and was even granted permission to visit her after he swore on his honor to return and never try to escape. A few weeks later, Jacques-Yves arrived unannounced with false passports and transit visas that would get his brother and his family first to Spain and then to South America. PAC refused to leave, telling Jacques that he had promised not to attempt an escape. The brothers argued. Jacques told Pierre-Antoine that his honor was already compromised as a collaborator, but family loyalty meant more than honor, acts of desperation during wartime, or political enchantment. PAC refused. Cousteau was incredulous. How could his brother not think of his own family before all else? PAC and his promise to a prison guard would be worthless to Fernande and his children when he stood against a wall smoking his last cigarette.
