Conquistadors of the Useless (3 page)

This depressing experience as leader of a rope left me with a lack of self-confidence which hindered my climbing career for a long time. I came to the conclusion that mountaineering was reserved for a few athletes of superhuman courage, strength and agility. Perhaps my lack of aptitude was due to insufficient strength? I therefore set myself to intensive daily physical culture, acquiring enormous arms for a boy of my age without, however, being able to climb any better as a result.

A second try at the Grange Gully turned out as much of a fiasco as the first. This time I was accompanied by my cousin Michel Chevallier, later to become an excellent mountaineer. At this time he had done no climbing at all, and so, although I was the younger by three years, I found myself again in the lead. This time the first pitch went without any excitement, but I didn't seem to be able to get up the last few feet of a chimney which followed. In order to get the better of this bit we had to perform some acrobatics, in which my cousin jammed himself across the chimney between its two walls and I climbed up on to his shoulders. My boot-nails bit into his flesh as I searched around for the holds above, wringing groans of suffering out of him. Once we were safely up this chimney Michel would not hear of continuing such a doubtful enterprise, and I returned to Grenoble sulky and disappointed at this new set-back.

On my next visit to Chamonix I did some more climbs with a guide, but unfortunately the one I employed was completely lacking in imagination or any spirit of enterprise, sticking the whole time to conventional routes of little difficulty. Furthermore he entertained a strong interest in the waitresses in the alpine huts, whatever their age and appearance. In order to return as quickly as possible to these dreams of delight, we almost ran up our climbs, and where I didn't climb fast enough for his taste he would drag me with the rope. In conditions like this it was difficult to perfect one's technique, and in fact I made hardly any progress that season.

The following winter, however, the gift for skiing which I had had since early childhood began to mature. In the regional competitions of the Dauphine no boy of my own age could keep up with me any more, and for this reason I was allowed to compete with the juniors and even the seniors. Despite this I still managed to carry off some of the prizes. Some people began to say that I had the makings of an international champion, and what was more serious, I began to believe them. From this time on, skiing occupied an always larger place in my life. After the winter was over I continued to go out every Sunday to practise skiing at high altitude up in the hills.

With the return of summer I went back to the Chamonix valley, where my mother had had a modest chalet built close to the charming ‘Hameau des Bois'. During the course of this season, I persuaded my guide to take me on the traverse of the Grépon – to ‘traverse' a peak in climbing parlance means to go up one side and down another. Now in those days equipment was still quite rudimentary, and, in particular, people still climbed in nails. The mental approach to mountains was also quite different from what it has become today. The traverse of the Grépon was still considered a very serious undertaking, for proven climbers only. Even with a guide, it was most unusual to do such a thing at the age of fourteen. I had read all the stories about the climb, especially that of the first ascent by Mummery, with passionate enthusiasm, and my youthful aspirations had fixed on it more than all others. For months I had dreamed of the day when I might tread its famous battlemented crest, composed of gigantic, geometrically shaped blocks of granite.

As the price for an enterprise of this kind was relatively high, I asked one of my friends, Alain Schmit, to share it with me. Alain was little older than myself, but he was a most gifted climber who had already done a number of classic routes. My guide knew all about him and had no objection to him coming along with us.

And so, one clear starry night, towards three o'clock in the morning, we set out from the old Montenvers Hotel which is the usual base for the Grépon. I was radiant with joy at the thought that, at long last, I was going to face one of the great Alpine routes. I felt bursting with energy and fitness. The day dawned magnificently fine, and it seemed that nothing stood between us and the enchanted hours of a good climb perfectly executed. I had forgotten one important detail, however: the Montenvers had not just one or two waitresses like the high huts, but at least a dozen. I shortly began to understand that the pace of my guide was directly proportional to the number of waitresses awaiting his return. Instead of contenting himself with his usual very fast walk, he was literally running! Alain and I were both good goers, and in training. We were also vigorous boys, and conscious of being so. Out of pride, therefore, we tried to keep up with the furious pace of our guide: but it was our pride that was our undoing.

Everything went quite well on the path, and even on the earlier part of the climb. After a few hours, however, we began to feel tired; and somewhere about the middle of the Charmoz-Grépon Couloir I started to weaken and asked the guide to slow up a little. He would hear of nothing of the sort. Despite the complete absence of clouds he declared a storm to be imminent, and averred we ought to hurry up. It was only very much later that I learned how useful rumours of storms could be to a guide!

At the foot of the Mummery crack, Alain and I, pretty well asphyxiated by our frenzied efforts, were at the end of our tether. Not far from tears, I begged the guide for a moment's rest and a little food, but he remained inflexible. He was an excellent climber, and a few seconds later he was at the top of the famous pitch: at once I felt myself being hoisted into the air as though by some mistake I had got attached to a crane. Hardly had I arrived on the platform at the top of the crack when I saw Alain come surging upwards out of the depths like a carp on the end of a fisherman's line. The rest of the climb remains a confused memory. Suffocated by the drag of the rope, groggy with fatigue, terrorised by the cries of the guide, everything after that seemed a sort of nightmare, and I only recovered consciousness in front of a glass of beer back at the Montenvers, well before noon, under a sky as marvellously blue as ever.

Like a good many others who have been the victims of the various playful little tricks which some professionals, luckily getting fewer and fewer, use to keep their clients moving, I was completely put off guided climbing by this meteoric experience, and indeed very nearly put off climbing altogether. However I did not attribute my miseries to any brutality or impatience on the part of my mentor; I simply decided that I was not cut out for climbing, and that big routes would always be out of the question. This loss of confidence in my abilities became a positive complex, and it was a good five years before a happy chance made me aware of my real potentialities.

For some time now my parents had been separated from each other, due to completely incompatible temperaments, and about this time they took the final decision to get divorced. I was entrusted to my father, who decided to send me to boarding school. The highly respectable institution he chose was a small seminary which, owing to its proximity to Grenoble, had got gradually diverted from its original purpose into a more or less open type of school. The rules and traditions had not changed accordingly, but remained rigid, harsh and anachronistic. The buildings of the college consisted of an old monastery which had been built in a magnificent position on a hill above the valley of the Isere, and the old walls surrounded with great trees were not without charm. From the outside, indeed, the establishment was positively attractive, but one was disillusioned the moment one set foot across the doorway.

Lacking even the most elementary comforts, the interior was dreary and dusty. Only the classrooms had any heating, which took the form of ancient stoves which smoked copiously. The enormous dormitories contained forty or fifty pupils at a time. The sole sporting facilities consisted of two medium-sized and almost unequipped yards. In this barrack-like place life was about as spartan as it could be. The half-cooked food was eaten off metal plates which were never washed. Hygiene existed as a quick rinsing of the hands and feet in cold water – there was apparently a room where students could hose each other down, but I never heard of anybody using it. On the whole a spartan life is not a bad thing, and even the bleakness of the place and the toughness of its ways might have been bearable if the pupils had not been submitted to an overloaded timetable, imposed with military discipline. To some ten hours of study were added a couple more of religious observances. Exercise was limited to one hour of recreation a day, one hour of physical jerks a week, and a short afternoon walk on Thursday and Sunday.

Used as I was to a life of liberty and intense physical exercise in permanent contact with nature, I was particularly ill-prepared for living in this sort of juvenile prison. From the moment I went there I felt as wretched as a caged nightingale. Nevertheless I hoped that the monastic regime would help me to catch up on my neglected studies, and I made up my mind to have an honest try at sticking it out. For two months I forced myself in praiseworthy fashion to respect the discipline of the place and to absorb the massive dose of knowledge which was administered to me. But the sedentary life we led, surrounded by an atmosphere of boot-licking, petty intrigue and dirty little secrets, seemed more intolerable to me with every day that went by. Finally I recognised that I was physically incapable of remaining shut up like this for months at a time, and wrote to my father asking him to take me away. I added that since my lack of scholastic aptitude became daily more obvious, I would like to give up this senseless waste of time and learn some kind of manual craft. My father, however, blinded by his pride as a middle-class intellectual, was quite unable to see that his son was incapable of pursuing higher studies. As might have been expected he took my letter in the worst possible way, and roundly informed me that I would remain at college, and that there could never be any question of my learning a trade. I replied that if he would not withdraw me from college of his own free will, he would be forced to by circumstances.

The following Sunday, having got permission to visit the town, I bought a blank-cartridge pistol and some ammunition. At midnight the first detonations resounded through the arches of the enormous dormitory. Others followed, creating an uproar quite unprecedented in the annals of the venerable establishment. The following morning at ten o'clock I was summoned to the headmaster's study, where my father was waiting for me, apoplectic with anger, and expelled from the college.

After this bombshell I feared the worst. Perhaps I would even be sent off to a reformatory? Nothing of the sort. On the contrary, my father, showing rather more insight than usual, went from one extreme to the other; after this unhappy experience of the effect of old-fashioned methods, he now placed me in a college where their methods were ultra-modern. The one he chose was situated at Villard-de-Lans, a resort some three thousand feet up in the Vercors range. There, he reckoned, I would get the skiing and climbing which seemed necessary to my physical and psychological balance, while still getting on with my studies.

This establishment, which was quite small, was run by a woman of great intelligence and culture. Despite a relatively light timetable and an atmosphere of friendly gaiety, she had had the ability to arrange things so that we got excellent teaching. The classes were of eight or ten students, who were all able to practise open-air sports every afternoon from two to half-past four. Thanks to this arrangement I was able to train at skiing daily throughout the winter, and every Sunday I could go in for competitions. Thus at the age of sixteen I first won the junior championship of the Dauphine, and came third in the senior category.

During the autumn and spring, skiing was replaced by walking in the woods and lower hills. As my walking capacities were much greater than the majority of the other students, the headmistress let me select a small group to take on much longer walks and even easy climbs, on my own responsibility. She even authorised me to go climbing properly, with one of the masters. By a lucky chance this man was an excellent climber and a member of the Groupe de Haute Montagne (or G.H.M.), a select association consisting of the majority of the best French mountaineers. I owe him a great deal, and it was with him that I was finally able to do the Grange Gully on the Trois Pucelles in satisfying circumstances.

Conditions in this school were perfectly suited to my tastes and temperament, and I spent two exceptionally happy years there, growing considerably in body and mind. As far as my studies went, I was never able to catch up sufficiently in some subjects to have any chance of passing my
baccalauréat
, but I did succeed in raising my intellectual level quite considerably, and even acquired a breadth of literary culture greater than normal for my age. When I sat the examination, however, my marks were so bad in all subjects except English and French that it should have been obvious to anyone that it was no good my going on trying. For all that my father decided that I should repeat the year and, in order that I should also be able to see more of my mother, who had been living in Chamonix for some time now, he sent me to be a boarder in a de luxe establishment in that capital of the mountaineering world. Unfortunately this school was much less well-run than the one at Villard-de-Lans, and the atmosphere was not at all pleasant. In any case I had no further illusions as to the utility of the studies I was forced to pursue.

In these circumstances I soon lost all interest in my work, and all my energies went into the one activity that gave me any satisfaction in life: skiing. Happily for me the school's timetable, though fuller than the one at Villard, made it possible for me to train every Thursday and to take part in Sunday competitions. As I could not get away until Sunday morning, I was, however, limited to the events held in the valley, and anything more than local was out of the question. This restriction of my freedom of movement led to some rather comic events. Having been selected to go in for the championships of France at Luchon, in the Pyrenees, I asked permission to be absent from school for a week in order to compete. As was quite normal, my request was rejected. At that time nothing seemed more important in my eyes than to compete in the championships, so I made up my mind to run away from school. For several days I was busy making preparations for my escape. On the night itself there was nothing more to it than to leave a message on my bunk, to open a first-storey window and throw out my sack, then to jump after it into the snow. A quarter of an hour later I was in the train, and by the time my absence was noticed next morning I was far away on the plains, rolling swiftly towards the distant Pyrenees.