Papillon

HENRI CHARRIÈRE

Papillon

Translated from the French by

PATRICK O’BRIAN

To the people of Venezuela, to the humble fishermen of the Gulf of Paria, to all those, intellectuals, soldiers and others who gave me my chance to make a new life.

To Rita, my wife, my best friend.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Translator’s Introduction

First Exercise-Book: Down the Drain

Second Exercise-Book: On the way to Guiana

Third Exercise-Book: First Break

Fourth Exercise-Book: First Break (continued)

Fifth Exercise-Book: Back to Civilization

Sixth Exercise-Book: The Iles du Salut

Seventh Exercise-Book: The Iles du Salut

Eighth Exercise-Book: Back to Royale

Ninth Exercise-Book: Saint-Joseph

Tenth Exercise-Book: Devil’s Island

Eleventh Exercise-Book: Farewell to Penal

Twelfth Exercise-Book: Georgetown

Thirteenth Exercise-Book: Venezuela

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Translator’s Introduction

All this last year France has been talking about Papillon, about the phènomène Papillon, which is not merely the selling of very large numbers of an unusually long book, but the discovery of a new world and the rediscovery of a kind of direct, intensely living narrative that has scarcely ever been seen since literature became self-conscious.

The new world in question is of course the underworld, seen from within and described with extraordinary natural talent by one who knows it through and through and who accepts its values, which include among others courage, loyalty and fortitude. But this is the real underworld, as different from the underworld of fiction as the act of love is different from adolescent imaginings, a world the French have scarcely seen except here and there in the works of Jean Genet and Albertine Sarrazin, or the English since Defoe; and its startling fierce uncompromising reality, savagely contemptuous of the Establishment, has shocked and distressed many a worthy bourgeois. Indeed, we have a minister’s word for it (a minister, no less) that the present hopeless moral decline of France is due to the wearing of miniskirts and to the reading of Papillon.

Nevertheless all properly equipped young women are still wearing miniskirts, in spite of the cold, and even greater numbers of Frenchmen with properly equipped minds are still reading Papillon, in spite of the uncomfortable feelings it must arouse from time to time. And this is one of the most striking things about the phénomène Papillon: the book makes an immense appeal to the whole range of men of good will, from the Academie française to the cheerful young mason who is working on my house. The literary men are the most articulate in their praise, and I will quote from François Mauriac, the most literary and articulate of them all, for his praise sums up all the rest and expresses it better. This piece comes from his Bloc-notes in the Figaro littéraire.

I had heard that it was a piece of oral literature, but I do not agree at all: no, even on the literary plane I think it an extraordinary talented book. I have believed that there is no great success, no overwhelming success, that is undeserved. It always has a deep underlying reason…I think that Papillon’s immense success is in exact proportion to the book’s worth and to what the author has lived through. But another man who had had the same life and had experienced the same adventures would have produced nothing from it at all. This is a literary prodigy. Merely having been a transported convict and having escaped does not mean a thing: you have to have talent to give this tale its ring of truth. It is utterly fascinating reading. This new colleague of ours is a master!

A thing that struck me very much in the book is that this man, sentenced for a killing that he did not commit…takes a very sanguine view of mankind. At the beginning of his first escape he was taken in and given shelter on a lepers’ island. The charity these most unfortunate, most forsaken of men showed to the convicts is truly wonderful. And it was the lepers who saw to it that they were saved. The same applies to the way they were welcomed in Trinidad and at Curaçao, not as criminals but as men who deserved admiration for having made that voyage aboard a nutshell. There is this human warmth all round them, and all through the book we never forget it. How different from those bitter, angry, disgusted books – Céline’s, for example.

Man’s highest virtues are to be found in what is called the gutter, the underworld; and what gangsters do is sometimes the same as what heroes do. I have already confessed that when I am very low in my mind I read detective stories. In these books, where everything is made up, the human aspect of the characters, the ‘humanity’, is appalling. But in Papillon’s tale, which is true, we meet a humanity that we love in spite of its revolting side. This book is a good book, in the deep meaning of the word.

When one has read a little way into Papillon one soon comes to recognize the singular truthfulness of the writing, but at first some readers, particularly English readers, wonder whether such things can be; and so that no time, no pleasure, should be lost, a certain amount of authentication may be in place.

Henri Charrière was born in 1906, in the Ardèche, a somewhat remote district in the south of France where his father was the master of a village school. After doing his military service in the navy, Charrière went to Paris, where, having acquired the nickname of Papillon, he soon carved himself out a respected place in the underworld: he had an intuitive perception of its laws and standards, and he respected them scrupulously. Papillon was not a killer at that time, but he fell foul of the police and when he was taken up on the charge of murdering a ponce he was convicted. The perjury of a witness for the prosecution, the thick stupidity of the jury, the utter inhumanity of the prosecuting counsel, and the total injustice of the sentence maddened him, for like many of his friends he had a far more acute sense of justice than is usual in the bourgeois world. What is more, the sentence was appallingly severe – transportation to the penal settlements in French Guiana and imprisonment for life without a hope of remission: and all this at the age of twenty-five. He swore he would not serve it, and he did not serve it. This book is an account of his astonishing escapes from an organization that was nevertheless accustomed to holding on to thousands of very tough and determined men, and of the adventures that were the consequences of his escapes. But it is also a furious protest against a society that can use human beings so, that can reduce them to despair and that can for its own convenience shut them up in dim concrete cells with bars only at the top, there to live in total silence upon a starvation diet until they are tamed, driven mad or physically destroyed – killed. The horrible, absolutely convincing account of his years in solitary confinement is very deeply moving indeed.

After years on the run, years of being taken and then escaping again even though he was on the ‘very dangerous’ list, Papillon finally got away from Devil’s Island itself, riding over many miles of sea to the mainland on a couple of sacks filled with coconuts. He managed to reach Venezuela, and eventually the Venezuelans gave him his chance, allowing him to become a Venezuelan citizen and to settle down to live in Caracas as quietly as his fantastic vitality would allow.

It was here that he chanced upon Albertine Sarrazin’s wonderful l‘Astragale in a French bookshop. He read it. The red band round the cover said 123rd thousand, and Papillon said, ‘It’s pretty good: but if that chick, just going from hideout to hideout with that broken bone of hers, could sell 123,000 copies, why, with my thirty years of adventures, I’ll sell three times as many.’ He bought two schoolboys’ exercise books with spiral bindings and in two days he filled them. He bought eleven more, and in a couple of months they too were full.

It is perhaps this extraordinary flow that accounts for some of the unique living quality of the book. A professional writer who puts down between one and two thousand words a day is doing very well: Papillon must have written about five thousand a day, and the result is very like the flow of a practised raconteur – indeed the book has been called a masterpiece of oral literature, and although this is not Mauriac’s view, with the utmost diffidence I (having lived with Papillon for months) venture to agree with it.

As luck would have it the manuscript was sent to Jean-Pierre Castelnau, the publisher who had discovered Albertine Sarrazin; and here I quote from his preface.

His manuscript reached me in September. Three weeks later Charrière was in Paris. Jean-Jacques Pauvert and I had launched Albertine: Charrière entrusted me with his book…

I have left this book, poured red-hot from his glowing memory and typed by various enthusiastic but not always very French hands, virtually untouched. All I have done is to put some order into the punctuation, change a few almost incomprehensible Spanish turns of phrase, and straighten out certain muddles and inversions that arise from his daily use of three or four different languages in Caracas, all learnt by ear.

I can vouch for the basic authenticity of the book. Charrière came to Paris twice and we talked a great deal. Whole days: and some nights too. Clearly, in thirty years some details may have grown dim and memory may have altered others. They are not of any importance. As for the background, one has but to glance at Professor Devèze’s Cayenne (Collection Archives, Julliard, 1965) to see that Charrière has by no means exaggerated either the way of life and morality of the penal settlement or its horror. Far from it.

As a matter of principle we have changed the names of all the convicts, warders and governors of the prison service, this book’s intention being not to attack individuals but to describe given characters and a given community. We have done the same with the dates: some are exact, others merely give a general notion of the period. That is all that is required.

Perhaps I should add something about the translation of the book. To begin with it was one of the hardest I have ever undertaken, partly because Papillon could not get into his stride, and I had to stumble along with him, for I resent ‘improvements’ in translation – they do not seem to me right. (Once, in one of my own novels, an Italian translator improved a difficult poem right out of existence.) And then there was the problem of his slang: Papillon does not use very much – nothing to compare with Albertine Sarrazin or Céline, for example – and it offers no great difficulty from the point of view of comprehension; but what he does use is strongly alive, far more immediate and personal than the comparatively limited vocabulary of the English underworld. So I was obliged to draw upon the more copious and vivid American: but then Papillon’s prison days were in the thirties and forties, so the slang had to belong to that period. Occasionally I have fallen into anachronism rather than sacrifice vividness, but on the whole I think the language, particularly the dialogue, is a reasonably faithful reflection of the original. Then again there was the question of obscenities. French of course makes a very free use of expressions such as con and merde whose literal equivalents are less often heard in English and therefore have a rather stronger effect; but on the other hand no one can be so simple as to suppose that thousands of ill-treated convicts herded together sound anything like a Sunday-school, so I have tried to steer between unnecessary grossness and inaccurate insipidity.

By the time I had settled these points Papillon had thoroughly hit his stride, and then I found that the best way of following his breakneck pace was to keep up with him. It is a pace that I am used to, for I have lived half my life among the most loquacious people in France, and although I could not translate quite as fast as Papillon wrote, I still finished the book in three months, treating it (to use Jean-Pierre Castelnau’s words) as the flow of ‘a sunlit, rather husky southern voice that you can listen to for hours on end’. And I may say that although in places it was tough going, all in all it was one of the most full and rewarding experiences in a literary life that has not been sparing in delights.

PATRICK O’BRIAN

Collioure, 1970

First Exercise-Book Down the Drain

The Assizes

The blow was such a stunner that it was thirteen years before I could get back on to my feet again. It was not the usual kind of blow either, and they clubbed together to let me have it.

This was 26 October 1931. At eight in the morning they had taken me out of my cell in the Conciergerie – the cell I had been living in for the past year. I was well shaved and well dressed: I looked as smooth as they come in my made-to-measure suit and white shirt with a pale-blue bow-tie to add the finishing touch.

I was twenty-five and I looked twenty. The gendarmes were rather impressed by my posh clothes, and they treated me civilly. They even took off the handcuffs. There we were, all six of us, the five gendarmes and me, sitting on two benches in a bare room. A dreary sky outside. The door opposite us must lead into the assize-court, for this building, this Paris building, was the Palais de Justice of the Seine.

In a few moments I was to be indicted for wilful homicide. My counsel, Maître Raymond Hubert, came in to see me. ‘There’s no solid evidence against you: I fully expect us to be acquitted.’ That ‘us’ made me smile. Anyone would have thought that Maître Hubert was going to appear in the dock too, and that if the verdict was guilty he too would have to serve time.

An usher opened the door and told us to come in. With four gendarmes round me and the sergeant to one side, I made my entrance through the wide-open double doors into an enormous court-room. They had done the whole place up in red, blood red, so as to hand me out this crushing blow – all red, the carpets, the curtains at the big windows and even the robes of the judges who were going to deal with me in two or three minutes’ time.

‘Gentlemen, the court!’

In single file six men appeared through a door on the right. The president of the court and then five other lawyers with their official hats, their toques, on their heads. The presiding judge stopped at the seat in the middle and his colleagues arranged themselves to the right and the left. There was an impressive silence in the room, and everybody was standing up, including me. The court took its seat, and so did everybody else.

The president was a fat-faced man with pink cheeks and a cold eye; he looked straight at me without letting any sort of feeling show. His name was Bevin. When things were under way he ran the trial fairly and he made it clear to one and all that as a professional lawyer he was not sure that either the witnesses or the police were all that straight. No: he had no responsibility for the crusher: all he did was to pass it on to me.

The public prosecutor was a lawyer called Pradel, and all the barristers were frightened of him. He had the evil reputation of sending more victims to the guillotine and the convict prisons in France and overseas than any other man.

Pradel stood for the vindication of society. He was the official prosecutor and there was nothing human about him. He represented the Law, the scales of justice: he was the one who handled them, and he did everything he possibly could to make them come down on the right side for him. He lowered the lids over his vulturish eyes and stared at me piercingly from his full height. From the height of his rostrum in the first place, which made him tower over me, and then from his own natural height, an arrogant six feet. He did not take off his red robe, but he put his toque down in front of him, and he leaned on his two great ham-sized hands. There was a gold ring to show he was married, and a ring on his little finger made of a highly polished horseshoe nail.

He leant over a little so as to dominate me all the more, and he looked as though he were saying, ‘If you think you can get away from me, young cock, you’ve got it wrong. My hands may not look like talons, but there are claws in my heart that are going to rip you to pieces. And the reason why all the barristers are afraid of me, the reason why the judges think the world of me as a dangerous prosecutor, is that I never let my prey escape. It’s nothing to do with me whether you’re guilty or innocent: all I’m here for is to make use of everything that can be said against you – your disreputable, shiftless life in Montmartre, the evidence the police have worked up and the statements of the police themselves. What I am to do is to take hold of all the disgusting filth piled up by the investigating magistrate and manage to make you look so revolting that the jury will see that you vanish from the community.’ Either I was dreaming or I could hear him perfectly distinctly: this man-eater really shook me. ‘Prisoner at the bar, just you keep quiet, and above all don’t you attempt to defend yourself. I’ll send you down the drain, all right. And I trust you’ve no faith in the jury? Don’t you kid yourself. Those twelve men know nothing whatsoever about life. Look at them, lined up there opposite you. Twelve bastards brought up to Paris from some perishing village in the country: can you see them clearly? Small shopkeepers, pensioners, tradesmen. It’s not worth describing them to you in detail. Surely you don’t expect them to understand the life you lead in Montmartre or what it’s like to be twenty-five? As far as they’re concerned Pigalle and the Place Blanche are exactly the same as hell and all night-birds are the natural enemies of society. They are all unspeakably proud of being jurymen at the Seine Assizes. And what’s more, I can tell you that they loathe their status – they loathe belonging to the pinched, dreary lower middle class. And now you make your appearance here, all young and handsome. Do you really suppose for a moment that I’m not going to make them see you as a night-prowling Montmartre Don Juan? That will put them dead against you right away. You’re too well dressed: you ought to have come in something very modest indeed. That was a huge tactical error of yours. Can’t you see how jealous of your suit they are? They all buy their clothes off the peg – they’ve never even dreamt of having a suit made to measure by a tailor.’

Ten o’clock, and we were all ready for the trial to start. Six official lawyers there in front of me, one of them a fierce, driving prosecutor who was going to use all his Machiavellian strength and all his intelligence to convince these twelve innocents that in the first place I was guilty and in the second that the only proper sentence was either penal servitude or the guillotine.

I was to be tried for the killing of a pimp, a police-informer belonging to the Montmartre underworld. There was no proof, but the cops (who get credit every time they find out who has committed a crime) were going to swear blind that I was guilty. Seeing they had no proof, they said they had ‘confidential’ information that left the matter in no doubt. The strongest piece of the prosecution’s evidence was a witness they had primed, a human gramophone-record manufactured at 36 quai des Orfèvres, their headquarters – a guy by the name of Polein. At one point, when I was saying over and over again that I did not know him, the president very fairly asked me, ‘You say this witness is lying. Very well. But why should he want to lie?’

‘Monsieur le President, I’ve had sleepless nights ever since I was arrested, but not out of remorse for having killed Roland le Petit, because I never did it. It’s because I keep trying to make out what kind of motive this witness can have for attacking me so ferociously and for bringing fresh evidence to support the charge every time it seems to weaken. I’ve come to the conclusion, Monsieur le President, that the police picked him up in the act of committing some serious crime and that they made a bargain with him – we’ll forget it, so long as you denounce Papillon.’

At the time I didn’t think I was so close to the truth. A few years later this Polein, who had been held up at the assizes as an honest man with no criminal record, was arrested and found guilty of peddling cocaine.

Maître Hubert tried to defend me, but he was not up to the size of the prosecutor. Maître Bouffay, with his warm-hearted indignation, was the only one to make Pradel struggle for a while. But it didn’t last, and the prosecutor’s skill soon got him on top again. What’s more, he flattered the jury, who swelled with pride at being treated as equals and as colleagues by this awe-inspiring character.

By eleven o’clock at night the game of chess was over. It was checkmate for my counsel. And I, an innocent man – I was found guilty.

In the person of Pradel, the public prosecutor, Society wiped out a young man of twenty-five for the term of his natural life. And none of your reductions, thank you very much! It was the president, Bevin, who handed me out this overflowing dish.

‘Prisoner, stand up,’ he said in a toneless voice.

I got to my feet. There was a complete silence in the court; people were holding their breath, and my heart beat a little faster. Some jurymen watched me; others hung their heads; they looked ashamed.

‘Prisoner, since the jury has answered yes to all the questions except for that of premeditation, you are sentenced to undergo penal servitude for life. Have you anything to say?’

I did not flinch; I stood there naturally; all I did was to grip the bar of the dock a little harder. ‘Yes, Monsieur le President: what I have to say is that I am truly innocent and that I am the victim of a plot worked up by the police.’ I heard a murmur from the place where there were some fashionably-dressed women, distinguished visitors, sitting behind the judges. Without raising my voice I said to them, ‘Shut up, you rich women who come here for dirty thrills. The farce is over. A murder has been solved by your clever police and your system of justice – you’ve had what you came for.’

‘Warders,’ said the President, ‘take the prisoner away.’

Before I vanished I heard a voice calling out, ‘Don’t you worry, sweetheart. I’ll come out there and find you.’ It was my brave, splendid Nénette giving full voice to her love. In the body of the court my friends of the underworld applauded. They knew perfectly well what to think about this killing, and this was their way of showing me that they were proud I had not given anything away or put the blame on anybody else.

Once we were back in the little room where we had been before the trial the gendarmes put the handcuffs on me, and one of them arranged a short chain, fixing my right wrist to his left. Not a word. I asked for a cigarette. The sergeant gave me one and lit it for me. Every time I took it out or put it back to my mouth the gendarme had to raise his arm or lower it to follow my movement.