True Summit

by David Roberts

  The article devolved into a profile of Herzog. Incredibly, in six pages of adulatory prose, not once did the reporter mention Lachenal. Instead, “On June 3, 1950, at 2:00 P.M., Maurice Herzog marked the triumph of his tactical campaign by planting his ice axe at 8,078 meters on the summit of Annapurna.” The photos dwelt on Herzog at his parents’ house in Saint-Cloud, Herzog as a young climber, Herzog front and center in a group photo with all “the greatest explorers of France.” The reporter had visited Herzog at home, surrounded by his souvenirs, including “The ‘Foca’ that took, at 8,078 meters, the famous photo immortalizing the French victory, which was a cover photo of Paris-Match.” A caption referred to “the Foca that accompanied him to the summit.” It was as if the camera had been Herzog’s only teammate on the summit, and the photo had taken itself.

  Thus began the insidious process by which Lachenal would come to be all but written out of the story. Whether this focusing on the leader to the exclusion of his teammates was due to the workings of Lucien Devies’s publicity machine (in his preface to Annapurna, Devies wrote, “The victory of the whole party was also, and above all, the victory of its leader”), or whether the credulous public needed to single out a “number one national hero,” a myth had begun irreversibly to form about the distant mountain. “Paris-Match . . . today presents you the man who has won the greatest glory because he underwent the greatest suffering.”

  Six months after returning from Annapurna, Herzog could walk in special shoes only with short, shuffling, uncertain steps. He had learned to grasp a pencil with several stumps on his right hand and produce a shaky scrawl. In the Neuilly hospital, Herzog prepared to “write” his book.

  According to the version of that process described in L’Autre Annapurna, each morning Herzog’s personal secretary, Nicole, sat by his bedside taking dictation. In the afternoon, back in her office, she typed up the text. The pair then went over it, making corrections.

  Like the strings of a violin, Nicole cried or laughed with me, as was the case. . . . Profoundly moved, even scarred, by my sometimes violent emotions, she announced, after the last sentence had been written, that since our mission was accomplished she was going to enter the Dominican order of the Campagnes under the name Sister Marie-Isaïe.

  Published on November 24, 1951, Annapurna became an instant sensation. For almost a year, it stayed in first place on the nonfiction best-seller list in France. Forty-eight years later, Herzog maintains in L’Autre Annapurna, the book has been “translated into almost all languages” and has sold fifteen million copies. (Conservative observers place the number at closer to eleven million. In either case, Annapurna stands as far and away the best-selling mountaineering book ever written.) If all the copies of the book sold over the past forty-seven years were stacked in a pile, Herzog brags, they “would surpass the height of a dozen Annapurnas.”

  The book, however, did not make Herzog rich, for from the start all the royalties were earmarked for the Himalayan Committee. It is no exaggeration to say that several decades’ worth of French expeditions to the great ranges (including several undertaken by Terray) were bankrolled by the profits from Annapurna.

  When I interviewed him in 1999, Herzog said he was especially gratified whenever he got a letter from someone (like myself) who had been inspired to climb by reading Annapurna. “I receive many letters from young Americans,” he said. “All these letters, from boys, from girls, touch me equally. I answer them all.

  “I showed the book [in manuscript] to all the members of the expedition,” Herzog insisted. “They all approved it. I tried to give each his due. They were all impressed by it—even Lachenal.”

  In L’Autre Annapurna, Herzog relates a curious exchange from the first year of his convalescence, when the Archbishop of Marseille visited his bedside. According to Herzog, the cleric forced upon him the comparison to the martyrdom of Christ that would come to inform his own sense of the meaning of Annapurna. This dignified man categorized his own visit to Herzog as a “pilgrimage.”

  “My son,” spoke the archbishop, “in the light of your own tribulation [calvaire], have you been able to imagine, if only in flashes, what the passion of Christ must have been?”

  Herzog admitted that the analogy of the nails driven through Christ’s hands and feet to his own suffering had sometimes occurred to him.

  “So the mountain was your cross?”

  Herzog demurred. “My story, alas, concerns only myself. It contains no mystery. Neither on the summit, nor during the interminable tragedy of the descent, had I any revelation or vision. Thus—and I am aware of disappointing you, Monsignor—I don’t consider myself the carrier of any message.”

  “The most edifying message is your example. You must bear witness to it.”

  As so often in this memoir, Herzog puts the words that praise him in another’s mouth. Did such a conversation really take place between the archbishop and the mountaineer? To convince the reader of the authenticity of his memory, Herzog reproduces a forty-seven-year-old dialogue verbatim, as though he had a tape recording of it.

  All the fetes and soirees that Herzog attended, in the wake of Annapurna, brought him into contact with the famous and the great. They, in turn, were eager to learn more about the ordeal of France’s newest hero. The “tacitum and introverted” adolescent that Herzog once thought himself had by now been well submerged in a charming, gregarious adult.

  When I interviewed her in 1999, Françoise Rébuffat acerbically mimicked the public performer that Herzog became: “He can cry whenever he wants. He puts on a trembling voice. ‘I have in my pocket a letter from a little boy in deepest France. No, I can’t show it to you. Yes, I shall. No. Yes.’ Finally he reads it: ‘ “M. Herzog, you are the greatest hero in the world.” ’ ”

  When Charles de Gaulle came into power in 1958, he appointed Herzog Minister of Youth and Sport, a post he held for the next eight years. With that appointment, he ended his work as a director of Kléber-Colombes. During the next decades, Herzog would serve on advisory boards for all sorts of businesses, but he never again had to hold down a true desk job in a company. From 1968 to 1977, he was mayor of Chamonix; then, from 1981 to 1984, president of the company in charge of the Mont Blanc tunnel.

  Over the years, Herzog served as a consultant and representative to a number of bodies, ranging from Olympic committees to parliamentary missions for nuclear affairs. His résumé bristles with titular honors: President of Ofexport (an organization exporting sports equipment), President of Triton France (an oil and gas consortium), President of Forces Motrices de Chancy-Pougny (a Swiss dam project).

  Some observers give Herzog high marks for his public career. Benoît Heimermann, a writer for L’Equipe magazine, says, “In the 1960 Olympics, the French performed awfully. De Gaulle said, ‘We have to do something about this.’ As Minister of Youth and Sport, Herzog was responsible for opening lots of stadiums, swimming pools, and so on. He did lots of good things.

  “As an industrialist, Herzog was very influential. He was a good Minister of Youth and Sport. But it’s hard not to be disappointed in this guy. He built his whole life on Annapurna. He did one thing, and after that he became a politician.”

  Writing about that public career in L’Autre Annapurna, Herzog lapses into shameless name-dropping and ill-disguised pats on his own back. On meeting John F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from Massachusetts, Herzog shares his idea of creating an “army” of young people pledged to work in underdeveloped countries—evidently the germ of the Peace Corps. “An admirable suggestion, Maurice,” says Kennedy, according to Herzog. “We need an ideal for our youth.”

  One day, in conversation with André Malraux, Herzog comes up with a spontaneous pensée: “What is culture, if not knowledge become conscience [connaissance devenue conscience]?”

  The born epigrammatist, Malraux asks if he can make this startling pensée his own.

  “It’s yours, André.”

  “Must I cite you?”


  “Not at all. What’s given is given.”

  Robert Oppenheimer, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Charles Lindbergh, Juan Perón, Brigitte Bardot, Jackie Kennedy—all meet Herzog and fall under the spell of his genius and charm. In a similar vein, Herzog limns his public career as noblesse oblige, rather than political ambition: To serve others was “a sacred duty.”

  Yet one must conclude that that public career has been a remarkably successful one. Herzog would never be able to climb again after Annapurna—though he hiked up Monte Rosa in 1955 with Lachenal as (some would argue) a publicity stunt. But by the 1990s, the man was firmly lodged in his country’s pantheon of heroes of sport and exploration. Herzog’s name means to the French-speaking world what Sir Edmund Hillary’s does to the English, what Reinhold Messner’s does to the German. Meanwhile, by the 1990s, the names of Herzog’s Annapurna teammates had slipped into limbo, known well only within the insular circles of serious mountaineers.

  So things stood, that is, until 1996. That year, the publication of Ballu’s biography of Rébuffat and Guérin’s edition of Lachenal’s diary exploded like twin bombshells. Annapurna was suddenly back in the news—but as the subject of revisionist revelations. The perfect fairy tale of Herzog’s book became a suspect fable. The iconoclasts started throwing stones.

  Herzog had told me that the controversy had troubled him not at all: “I have the experience of the truth.” Journalists close to the scene knew better. Says L’Equipe’s Benoît Heimermann, “Herzog was distraught about the controversy. He tried everything he could do to stop it. He tried to use his influence with the press.

  “This business has done a fair amount of damage to Herzog’s reputation. In Chamonix or Grenoble, people are disappointed. In Paris, I suppose, he’s still a great man.”

  AMONG ALL NINE TEAMMATES on Annapurna, none—not even the liaison officer, Francis de Noyelle—emerges in Herzog’s book as more shadowy than Jean Couzy. Indeed, in Annapurna, Couzy is almost faceless. The youngest climber at twenty-seven, the one who has the most trouble acclimatizing, the one whom Herzog relegates to organizing load-carries low on the mountain, always (it seems) ill and weak—Couzy stumbles through the expedition like a sleepwalker. He never complains, never enters into the “polemics” that always seem to center on Lachenal, yet he is seldom cited by Herzog as having done much at all to help the team’s efforts.

  On the basis of his portrait in Annapurna alone, it would have made sense had it been Couzy, rather than his close companion, Schatz, who would quit mountaineering within the year following the expedition. Instead, Couzy went on to become a brilliant climber, with, as Terray wrote in Conquistadors, “one of the greatest alpine records of all time.”

  Couzy started climbing on modest routes in the Pyrenees at age fifteen. Meeting Schatz in 1946, he embarked on a career of solid face climbs all over the Alps. Eventually he would knock off many of the most vaunted routes of his day, including the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses and the wildly overhanging north face of the Cima Ovest di Lavaredo in the Dolomites. He also put up new routes stamped with an elegant purity of line, a boldness of conception. Yet he was known to be a very safe climber. He had chosen never to attempt the north face of the Eiger (of which Terray and Lachenal had made the second ascent), because he judged it too dangerous.

  Couzy’s climbing was carved out of a promising career as an aeronautical engineer. He made an art form of the three-day weekend, borrowing a plane from his flying club to whisk off to whatever part of France had the best weather forecast, where he would storm up some route that would take lesser climbers a week to prepare for.

  At the age of twenty-seven, he was thin, lithe, and remarkably handsome, with a penetrating gaze and a strong, thin-lipped mouth. According to Schatz, Couzy “burned with ideas, impassioned alike by jazz and art.” He was an omnivorously curious climber who taught himself Italian and relearned German so that he could read the local guidebooks and better commune with the pioneers of the routes he attacked.

  In 1948, Couzy married a young woman who promptly went out and climbed many difficult routes with him. After Annapurna, Lise Couzy would give birth to four children, including twins in 1955.

  Terray analyzed Couzy’s strengths and weaknesses in Conquistadors:

  Muscular and with tremendous stamina under his almost frail appearance, he was an accomplished athlete. Unshakeable health and the digestive system of an ostrich were further assets on big climbs. A certain lack of manual dexterity handicapped him, by contrast, in his earlier days; and on mixed ground [i.e., the very terrain that was Terray’s forte], where no technique or intelligence can make up for instinctive neatness of gesture, he always remained slow and ill at ease. . . . On rock, in particular, he became a past-master.

  Other climbers would have been content to specialize in the alpine big-wall routes that quickly became Couzy’s specialty. Yet despite his unhappy experience on Annapurna, Couzy returned twice to the Himalaya, in 1954 and 1955. On the reconnaissance of Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, the first year, and on its successful ascent the following, Couzy became the “motor”—the strongest climber, driving his teammates to triumph, even though Terray, by then the finest expeditionary mountaineer in France and maybe the world, was along on both expeditions.

  In Conquistadors, Terray acknowledged what may have been Couzy’s stellar deed in the mountains, the lightning-strike first ascent of Chomolonzo in 1954, after the team had run out of time on Makalu. This subsidiary peak, which stood only 200 meters below the prestigious 8,000-meter line, was a major challenge in its own right.

  Throughout the whole of the previous night we had been battered by the most violent tempest I have ever known in the Himalayas. Our tent seemed likely to rip in two at any moment, and some of the seams did in fact yield under the sledge-hammer blows of the wind. At dawn the temperature was -27° Centigrade inside the tent. . . . [P]ersonally I had no thought but to get down out of it all as quickly as possible. Only Jean’s magnetic personality constrained me to follow him like one condemned to the scaffold. There were tears in the Sherpas’ eyes when they saw us preparing to set out, so little hope had they of seeing us again!

  The following year, Couzy and Terray were the first pair to reach the summit of Makalu, on a French expedition so strong that all nine climbers eventually reached the top. None of the other thirteen 8,000-meter peaks would first succumb to such a clockwork victory.

  On November 2, 1958, Couzy was attempting a new route on the Roc des Bergers in the Alps with his friend Jean Puiseux. Couzy was leading. Puiseux heard a noise he knew all too well—that of a rock falling from high above. He yelled, “Watch out!” The stone struck the wall and caromed wildly. Couzy never had time to move. The rock struck him square in the head, killing him at once.

  Somehow Puiseux soloed up the rest of the wall, then accomplished an arduous descent. The recovery of Couzy’s body took a crack team two days of perilous toil.

  Eight men, including Schatz, carried Couzy’s bier to his grave near Montmaur, in the Hautes-Alpes. Two years later, a commemorative plaque was mounted on the forest hut where Couzy had bivouacked the night before the fatal climb. Its legend reads:

  JEAN COUZY

  1923–1958

  Alpinist extraordinaire who opened or repeated, from the Olan to Makalu, the most beautiful routes in the world.

  At the time of his death, at thirty-five, Couzy left children of seven, five, and (his twins) three years of age.

  In a moving obituary, Schatz spoke of Couzy’s “purity.” “That was the secret of his demeanor in the mountains in the face of danger—no physical fear ever bothered him; he acted always as though, with everything carefully weighed, he had decided to act.” In Conquistadors, Terray wrote, “Jean was not made for the rat-race of this world. He was a sort of saint, an idealist tormented by visions of the absolute.”

  In Paris in the spring of 1999, I met Lise Couzy. A strikingly handsome, dignified woman, she had never remarri
ed. She recounted the moment forty-one years earlier when she had received the terrible news. Puiseux had telephoned a friend in Lyon, who in turn telephoned Lise’s mother, whom Lise was visiting. “When I saw my mother’s face, I knew,” she told me.

  At first, it was more than she could bear to tell her children. “Where’s Papa?” asked her son that evening. “Maybe he’ll come back later,” she prevaricated.

  “Jean stayed friends with the other Annapurna climbers,” Lise Couzy recalled. “He and Terray were particularly close. And he very much liked Lachenal. He was not at all disappointed in Annapurna, even though for him it was a very hard expedition, a very tough return.

  “When he was off on Makalu, I had a lot of fear. But I knew this was his passion. On Makalu, Terray lost six kilograms, but Jean put on six kilos! It was a matter of different metabolisms.

  “After his death, everybody spoke so well of Jean, but they didn’t really know him. I never thought of marrying again. Jean was my hero. He still is.”

  GASTON RÉBUFFAT RETURNED from Annapurna deeply disenchanted. According to Françoise, one of the first things he said was, “I don’t believe any more in friendship.” His long relationship with Terray was irrevocably damaged by the expedition. Says Françoise of the dolorous march out from Annapurna, “After that, Gaston was no longer friends with Lionel, because Lionel had seen the political advantage of taking care of Herzog. Often Lachenal was left alone lying on his stretcher, so Gaston stayed with him.”