Conquistadors of the Useless (33 page)

‘Avez vous eu un beau ‘show' au Mont Tremblant?'

Sometimes an English turn of phrase is adapted. One says ‘on va se faire poser' for ‘on va se faire photographier'. There are also some purely French-Canadian expressions, such as ‘c'est bien de malheur' instead of ‘c'est bien malheureux', and ‘c'est pas pire' for ‘ce n'est pas mal'.
[5]
Odder still, they translate into French English expressions which have passed intact into our language. They always say ‘la balle au pied', ‘la balle au panier', ‘la fin de la semaine', ‘le chandail', ‘le vivoir'; instead of ‘football', ‘basket-ball', weekend, pullover and living room.

Only the lower classes speak anything resembling a patois, and even that is quite simple. I could communicate perfectly with peasants and lumberjacks in under a month; so much so, in fact, that after a few minutes conversation in a train one day with two lumberjacks, one of them asked me:

‘You've got a hell of a funny accent. Where do you come from, anyway – out west?'

There is really no difficulty in making oneself understood, then, with anybody the least bit civilised: but that does not mean there is no language problem. The rustic accent and peculiar expressions undoubtedly make French-Canadian sound rather comic to us, and it is difficult sometimes not to show it. During my second winter, my French friend and assistant Francis Aubert, who was extremely handsome, had enormous success with the girls. Before long, however, I noticed that he only went out with English-speaking women, in spite of the fact that the Québéçoises were most attractive. When I asked him the reason for this, he replied:

‘As soon as they open their mouths I start laughing, and that ruins everything!'

Having no problems of communication, French immigrants do not have to go through the normal process of adaptation to a foreign country. But it is precisely this difficulty which normally makes new arrivals humble and polite, thus creating a favourable impression on the part of the regular inhabitants. But in this case the newcomer speaks the language more elegantly than the native, so that the effect is reversed. The immigrants tend to be condescending towards their hosts. Priding themselves on coming from the wittiest nation in the world, many of them have the unfortunate habit of exercising their wit on the Canadians, teasing them about their manners and their rustic speech. This sort of humour is quite common at home, and no doubt they do it without meaning any harm, but the Canadians, who rightly consider themselves our equals or superiors in a good many fields, do not appreciate it. They have something of an inferiority complex about the whole thing which makes them very prickly to native Frenchmen. Thus the language they have in common, far from bringing the two sister races together, tends to cause friction between them. In support of my theory I would quote the odd fact that Frenchmen often get on better in the English-speaking part of the country.

Quite apart from the language question, the Canadians' way of looking at life is very different from our own. This is so to such an extent that the French often feel more at home in Brazil, Chile or the Argentine than in ‘Nouvelle France'. The French-Canadians, after all, have been cut off from the mother country for two hundred years. They live in a vast, bleak continent among extremes of climate, and they are deeply influenced by American civilisation. These circumstances have given them a character all their own, equally different from the metropolitan French and from the Americans. Two apparently contradictory influences have contributed to creating a mentality which others are apt to find disconcerting: religion and materialism. In the Province of Quebec where even apart from the huge French majority there are a lot of Irish people; Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion, by contrast with the rest of the country where Protestantism and even Puritanism are the norm. The people's devotion to their faith is fanatical, rather as in Spain, but with a character all its own, and manifestations of its influence on social life can be surprising to a Frenchman, even if he is a practising Catholic. One can go so far as to say that life is completely controlled and dominated by the Church. Avowed atheism is practically non-existent, and cannot fail to have serious consequences for anyone rash enough to profess it. Daily church-going is normal, and not to go to mass on Sundays is a sort of crime. A great many people go twice a day.

The clergy is prosperous and extremely numerous. In the town of Quebec it is difficult to walk a hundred yards without encountering a soutane or a biretta, and few families lack a member in holy orders. The Church's temporal power is still considerable, its word virtually law. In 1948, for example, the Bishop of Quebec forbade dancing in public places. The same gentleman also prohibited the Roland Petit ballet, in which one would be hard put to it to find any erotic suggestion.

The reader will easily see that so much piety and clerical power rob life of many of its graces, and can be very disconcerting to a newcomer. The most disappointing aspect of the business is that the effects are mostly external. One might imagine that such pious folk would be exemplary in their conduct, but one cannot in honesty state that people in Quebec are any saintlier than elsewhere. Quite objectively, I think that French-Canadians are neither better nor worse than other races I have known. Only the Sherpas have seemed less evil than the others.

Sexual promiscuity is less openly displayed in Quebec than in France, but perhaps no less widespread. Drunkenness is frequent. People are more honest than in a good many other countries, but naturally there are those who will make the sign of the cross before playing a dirty trick. The manners of the working classes are brutal, and Christian charity is by no means always to be found.

Ice hockey is the main sport. It attracts enormous crowds, and I must admit I know of no other game so fascinating to watch. But it is impossible for anyone who has not seen it with his own eyes to imagine the brutality and violence with which it is played in Canada. Only bull-fighting compares with it for the passion which it arouses in the spectators. Wrestling and boxing are also very popular. This taste for violence also finds outlets in daily life, so that to tread on someone's toe in a tram or bump into a passer-by can easily become the pretext for a fight. This crude behaviour is, after all, understandable in a population which less than a hundred years ago lived almost entirely in small, isolated settlements in the depths of the illimitable and hostile forest.

But if religion is a determining influence on French-Canadian life, by a curious paradox materialism is no less so. Here, perhaps even more than in the United States, the dollar is king. Economic life in this vast country, with its less than twenty million inhabitants, is entirely based on the most naked kind of capitalism, in which free enterprise implies pitiless competition.

Well-governed and efficiently administered as it certainly is, Canada is still in essence a nation of pioneers. Immeasurable resources remain to be exploited. Everything is susceptible of development, thousands of things still to be begun. The general level of prosperity is spectacular, and the whole life of the nation is geared to a gigantic effort of expansion. In such an atmosphere anything which does not contribute to wealth is discounted. Money is all-powerful, and the measure of a man's value is the size of his bank account. The first thing anybody asks about a man is ‘How much is he worth?', an expression which I have always found shocking.

It goes without saying that in these circumstances conspicuous consumption becomes the first rule of life, and the net result is an excessive dependence on luxuries. This ostentation can prove trying to the few Frenchmen who still accord priority to artistic, intellectual and moral values, but it has to be recognised that such persons are becoming increasingly unusual. Since the war ‘the American way of life' has spread alarmingly in our own country, and nowadays we have little to learn when it comes to materialism from our overseas cousins. The Canadians have their faults, certainly – who hasn't? – but they also have many fine qualities.

Once one has overcome their barrier of suspicion against French immigrants these qualities become evident. Thanks to my work I came into contact with a wide cross-section of the population and was invited into homes of every social stratum, so that I can fairly claim to have some knowledge of the subject. I learnt to appreciate their hospitality, their high spirits, their industriousness, their faithfulness in friendship, and above all a certain steadfastness of purpose lacking in the French proper, whose sparkle and frivolity can become so trying in the end. I cannot go along with those who find life impossible among the French-Canadians, since in a few months I was able, if not to assimilate their ways completely, at least to learn to suffer them gladly. I made several good friends in Quebec with whom I still correspond.

The main drawback of Canada is in my view the climate rather than the human factor. The six-month winter is altogether too long, windy and dark. Spending half the year in conditions like this is bound to be rather a gloomy affair, and the excessive heat of summer is hardly more agreeable.

The French always make the mistake of presuming themselves the salt of the earth, and their civilisation intrinsically superior to all others. If they could learn to accept Canada as it is instead of seeing it solely in terms of France, many of them could find there a field of action far wider than our overcrowded old world, and a second home which, though less smiling than the first, has more to offer than most other countries. Personally I owe a lot to those early overseas adventures. Nothing very exciting happened, but the encounter with new lands and men widened my horizons and showed me that there were other things in life than skiing and mountains. The human experience was to be very valuable to me later.

I had saved hard while I was away, and on getting back to France found myself with twice as much money as ever before. This relative affluence gave me just the cushion I needed for the change to independent guiding. Luckily the summer of 1949 was almost as fine as that of 1947, and my step in the dark turned out to have been a masterstroke. I accumulated clients and climbs at such a rate that by the end of the season I was declared ‘le plus fort en masse', in other words the guide who had earned most. According to the rules of the Compagnie each guide must pay five per cent of his earnings into the ‘masse', or kitty; three per cent goes to the running-expenses of the Bureau, and the rest to a kind of insurance and benevolent fund.

I had in fact done over fifty respectable climbs during the season, and had also had the luck to be engaged by several excellent mountaineers, with whom I had done things like the first direct ascent of the Tronchey arête on the Grandes Jorasses, the Route Major and Sentinelle Rouge on Mont Blanc, the Aiguilles du Diable, and the Aiguille Verte by the Arête Sans Nom twice. This last seems to have become one of my specialities, since I have done it seven times up to the present moment. But more than ever it was brought home to me how difficult it would be to specialise in guiding on the great routes.

Taking into account how few mountaineers engage guides to do big climbs, I had already had fantastic luck, yet advanced climbing had taken up less than half of my time. In order to earn a decent living without wasting any part of that perfect but all too brief season I had been obliged to do numerous classics, and even a good deal of very small fry indeed, such as the Petits Charmoz or the Clochetons de Planpraz.

I remarked above that guiding called for psychological insight. To be quite honest, this statement applies not only on the mountain but also in persuading the client to choose a financially interesting climb. To succeed in the profession one must be something of a salesman! A number of my colleagues are by no means to be underrated in this department, and one of them has become a veritable past-master. His powers of advocacy have always been at once my admiration and my envy. To take one example: he is a fine climber, and he has discovered that the south face of the Dent du Géant is an excellent commercial proposition. It combines the virtues of brevity and quick accessibility, yet it is an undeniably impressive-looking peak, and as the actual climbing is quite difficult it commands a high tariff.

When a new client approaches him you may rest assured that, whatever the former's desires or ability, they will end up by setting out for the south face of the Géant. Sometimes all goes well, sometimes the climb turns out to be too hard. But no matter: one of the first skills one learns as a guide is how to hoist an exhausted man, and up goes the client like a rucksack. The extraordinary thing is that the client is almost always delighted. He may not have enjoyed the climbing as such, but to have done such a climb cannot help but flatter his vanity.

The great weak point of my career has been my almost total inability to persuade clients to do ascents which suited me rather than them. I have hardly ever managed to undertake a succession of engagements from one base, so that to fulfil my commitments I have had to make hurried and tiring journeys from one refuge to another. Sometimes I have thus even got myself into stupid situations, such as on one occasion when I had to do the Grépon twice and the Jardin ridge of the Verte twice in four days. The starting points of these two ascents are two hours' rapid march apart. Instead of doing the thing logically, that is to say the Verte twice in succession and then the Grépon, I did them alternately, thus giving myself ten hours hut-bashing instead of four.

The most exhausting combination of starting points I can remember occurred during that summer of 1949. The cable car being broken down, I plodded up to Plan de l'Aiguille the first evening in a couple of hours. The following morning we left the hut at 4.30 a.m., traversed the Peigne and the Aiguille des Pèlerins (by the voie Carmichael) and got back down by 2 p.m. After a short rest I left my client and rushed round to the Requin hut via Montenvers in three hours, where a client from Zurich was waiting for me. We then toiled for another three hours through the soft evening snow to the hut on the Col du Géant, which we reached about 10 p.m. At 3 a.m. we were off again for the traverse of the Aiguilles du Diable, and as my client was off form this took us fifteen hours. A day and a half later we went up to the Aiguille Noire hut, did the south ridge, and bivouacked on the descent.