An ex-convict and his best-seller
By Edward Behr, writing from Paris to Newsweek Feature Service.
Take a small-time Paris thief. Convict him of murder he insists he did not commit Cruelly confine him for life to the notorious penal colonies of French Guiana, Subject him to the full range of inhuman treatment. Add rape, sodomy, stabbings and have a horde of red ants attack and devour a helpless guard. Top it all off with no less than nine harrowing escape attempts and, voila, you have: “Papillon,” the hottest book in the history of French publishing. In 16 months, it has sold more than a million copies, become a best-seller all across the rest of Europe and earned more than $2 million in United States paperback, book club and movie rights even before the American translation appeared this autumn. Whether you have the truth is another matter. For in setting down his allegedly autobiographical yam, 64-year-old Henri Charriere, who spent 12 years imprisoned or on the lam in the sweltering tropics, outspins Dumas on almost every page. By his account, he made his first escape a mere three weeks after arriving at the infamous Cayenne penitentiary in 1933 and spent months hiding out in the Colombian jungle, living with wild Indian tribes and fathering two offspring with two pearl-diving maidens. The French authorities finally recaptured him, as they did on seven subsequent occasions. But in 1941, Charriere writes that he simply floated away from Devil’s Island on a buoy of jute bags and hollow coconut shells and, after tossing about in sharkinfested waters and a howling gale for 36 hours, washed ashore unharmed and made his way to safety in British Guiana. In between these escapes, Charriere recounts with the gift of a bom storyteller the assorted brutalities of penal servitude in Cayenne, a horrific catalogue that includes a two-year stretch in solitary confinement. "The Chinese invented the drop of water falling on the head,” he writes. “The French invented silence.” Throughout the book, Charriere invests himself with a strength, courage and integrity that makes James
Bond seem like Little Nell. At one point, for instance, he wins a pardon from a spell in maximum security for saving a guard’s daughter from drowning. Charriere, moreover, insistently protests his innocence of the crime that put him away, claiming he was framed by the police in 1931 for the murder of a Montmartre pimp named Charles LeGrand. The book has made Charriere a major celebrity both in France and in
his adopted home of Caracas, Venezuela, where he moved almost 30 years ago to marry and raise a family. In Paris, which he visits frequently, he is lionised by the press, invited to all the right Jet Set parties and even called upon to lecture at the Sorbonne. And in Venezuela, says one journalist, “he is second in popularity only to Simon Bolivar.” Charriere wrote “Papillon” in three months during 1968, hoping to recoup some of the money he had lost the previous year when an earthquake destroyed the prospering restaurant he had operated for several years in Caracas. “I just went out and bought a child’s ruled notebook and started to
write down what I remembered,” the author recalls in his thick Provencal accent. “It took me 13 notebooks to say what I felt I had to say.” Pressed to explain how he managed to recall the minutest details of events that took place 30 years ago, Charriere insists that months of brooding about them in solitary confinement had left him with "a hypertrophic memory.” And a fertile imagination, say his critics. One former inmate of Cayenne, writing in a French magazine, charged that "Papillon” (so called for the butterfly tattoo on Charrierre’s chest) is little more than “a hodge-podge of all the stories ever told about Cayenne.” And in a book explaining Charriere’s life up until the LeGrand murder, former “Paris Match” reporter Georges Menager draws a portrait from court files of a pimp and police informer, not someone who was as Charriere claims “Always a pure thief.” More damaging, however, is another, longer book called "Papillon Epingle” (literally, the butterfly pinned) by French journalist and mystery writer Gerard de Villiers, who maintains that “only about 10 per cent of Charriere’s book represents the truth.” For example, de Villiers fairly conclusively puts down Charriere’s claims that he rescued the guard’s daughter, served more than five months in solitary and witnessed cannibalism among a group of escaped prisoners an incident that occurred 11 years before the author arrived- at Cayenne. Charriere’s publisher, Robert Laffont, maintains “Papillon Epingle” is part of a government effort to discredit the exposure of past conditions in the penal colonies and to counter Charriere’s contention that French justice “hasn’t changed since Louis XI.” Laffont has even set out formally to debunk the debunkers by commissioning two freelance writers to spend several months in and around Cayenne. “The results will show how superficial the de Villiers book is,” boasts Laffont. As for Charriere himself, he is too busy toting up his royalties, filming a movie with Claudia Cardinale and making personal appearance tours to worry much about the controversy. But he knows a good thing. “I’ll make a reply in my next book,” he says, “like Emile Zola.”
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Press, Volume CX, Issue 32430, 17 October 1970, Page 10
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879An ex-convict and his best-seller Press, Volume CX, Issue 32430, 17 October 1970, Page 10
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