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Papillon (P.S.) Paperback – August 1, 2006
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“A modern classic of courage and excitement.” —The New Yorker
Soon to be a Major Motion Picture Starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek
Henri Charrière, nicknamed "Papillon," for the butterfly tattoo on his chest, was convicted in Paris in 1931 of a murder he did not commit. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, he became obsessed with one goal: escape. After planning and executing a series of treacherous yet failed attempts over many years, he was eventually sent to the notorious prison, Devil's Island, a place from which no one had ever escaped . . . until Papillon. His flight to freedom remains one of the most incredible feats of human cunning, will, and endurance ever undertaken.
Charrière's astonishing autobiography, Papillon, was first published in France to instant acclaim in 1968, more than twenty years after his final escape. Since then, it has become a treasured classic--the gripping, shocking, ultimately uplifting odyssey of an innocent man who would not be defeated.
“A first-class adventure story.” — New York Review of Books
- Print length576 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWilliam Morrow Paperbacks
- Publication dateAugust 1, 2006
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.92 x 8 inches
- ISBN-109780061120664
- ISBN-13978-0061120664
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A first-class adventure story.” — New York Review of Books
“[Papillon] is the ultimate hero defying the ultimate system of oppression and succeeding by dint of will, optimism...[and] a sense of honor given only to West Point graduates and Paris thieves.” — New York Times
“The greatest adventure story of all time.” — Auguste Le Breton
“A modern classic of courage and excitement.” — Janet Flanner (Gênet), The New Yorker
From the Back Cover
Henri Charrière, called "Papillon," for the butterfly tattoo on his chest, was convicted in Paris in 1931 of a murder he did not commit. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, he became obsessed with one goal: escape. After planning and executing a series of treacherous yet failed attempts over many years, he was eventually sent to the notorious prison, Devil's Island, a place from which no one had ever escaped . . . until Papillon. His flight to freedom remains one of the most incredible feats of human cunning, will, and endurance ever undertaken.
Charrière's astonishing autobiography, Papillon, was published in France to instant acclaim in 1968, more than twenty years after his final escape. Since then, it has become a treasured classic -- the gripping, shocking, ultimately uplifting odyssey of an innocent man who would not be defeated.
About the Author
Born in 1906, and imprisoned in 1931, Henri Charrière finally escaped in 1945 to Venuzuela, where he married, settled in Caracas, and opened a restaurant. He died in 1973.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Papillon
By Henri CharriereHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Henri CharriereAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0061120669
Chapter One
First Notebook
The Descent Into Hell
It was a knockoutblow -- a punch so overwhelming that I didn't get back on my feet for fourteen years. And to deliver a blow like that, they went to a lot of trouble.
It was the twenty-sixth of October, 1931. At eight o'clock in the morning they let me out of the cell I'd been occupying in the Conciergerie for a year. I was freshly shaved and carefully dressed. My suit was from a good tailor and gave me an air of elegance. A white shirt and pale-blue bow tie added the final touches.
I was twenty-five but looked twenty. The police were a little awed by my gentlemanly appearance and treated me with courtesy. They had even taken off my handcuffs. All six of us, the five policemen and I, were seated on two benches in a bare anteroom of the Palais de justice de Ia Seine in Paris. The doors facing us led to the courtroom. Outside the weather was gray.
I was about to be tried for murder. My lawyer, Raymond Hubert, came over to greet me. "They have no real proof," he said. "I'm confident we'll be acquitted." I smiled at that we. He wasn't the defendant. I was. And if anybody went to jail, it wouldn't be him.
A guard appeared and motioned us in. The double doors swung wide and, flanked by four policemen and a sergeant, I entered the enormous room. To soften me up for the blow, everything was blood red: the rugs, the draperies over the big windows, even the robes of the judges who would soon sit in judgment over me.
"Gentlemen, the court!"
From a door on the right six men filed in, one after the other: the President, then the five magistrates, their caps on their heads. The President stopped in front of the middle chair, the magistrates took their places on either side.
An impressive silence filled the room. Everyone remained standing, myself included. Then the Bench sat down and the rest of us followed suit.
The President was a chubby man with pink cheeks and a cold eye. His name was Bevin. He looked at me without a trace of emotion. Later on, he would conduct the proceedings with strict impartiality, and his attitude would lead everyone to understand that, as a career judge, he wasn't entirely convinced of the sincerity of either the witnesses or the police. No, he would take no responsibility for the blow; he would only announce the verdict.
The prosecutor was Magistrate Pradel. He had the grim reputation of being the "number one" supplier to the guillotine and to the domestic and colonial prisons as well.
Pradel was the personification of public vengeance: the official accuser, without a shred of humanity. He represented law and justice, and he would do everything in his power to bend them to his will. His vulture's eyes gazed intently down at me-down because he sat above me, and down also because of his great height. He was at least six foot three-and he carried it with arrogance. He kept on his red cloak but placed his cap in front of him and braced himself with hands as big as paddles. A gold band indicated he was married, and on his little finger he wore a ring made from a highly polished horseshoe nail.
Leaning forward a little, the better to dominate me, he seemed to be saying, "Look, my fun-loving friend, if you think you can get away from me, you're much mistaken. You don't know it, but my hands are really talons and they're about to tear you to pieces. And if I'm feared by the lawyers, it's because I never allow my prey to escape.
"It's none of my business whether you're guilty or innocent; my job is to use everything that's available against you: your bohemian life in Montmartre, the testimony extorted from the witnesses by the police, the testimony of the police themselves. With the disgusting swill the investigator has collected, I must make you seem so repulsive that the jury will cast you out of the society of men."
Was I dreaming or was he really speaking to me? Either way I was deeply impressed by this "devourer of men."
"Don't try to resist, prisoner. Above all, don't try to defend yourself. I'm going to send you down the road of the condemned anyway. And I trust you have no faith in the jury. Have no illusions in that quarter. Those twelve know nothing of life.
"Look at them, there in front of you. Can you see them clearly, those dozen cheeseheads brought to Paris from some distant village? They're only petits bourgeois, some retired, others small businessmen. Not worth talking about. You can't expect them to understand your twenty-five years and the life you've led in Montmartre. To them, Pigalle and the Place Blanche are hell itself, and anybody who stays up half the night is an enemy of society. They like to serve on this jury, are extremely proud of it, in fact.
Moreover, I can assure you, they're all acutely aware of their own mean little lives.
"And here you are, young and handsome. Surely you realize I'm going to hold nothing back when I describe you as a Don Juan of Montmartre? I'll make them your enemies straight off. You're too well dressed. You should have worn more humble garments. Ah, that was a major tactical error. Don't you see they envy you your clothes? They buy theirs at Samaritaine. Never have they gone to a tailor, even in their dreams."
It was now ten o'clock, and we were ready to start. Before me were six magistrates, one of whom was an aggressive attorney who was going to use all his Machiavellian power and intelligence to convince these twelve shopkeepers that I was guilty...
Continues...
Excerpted from Papillonby Henri Charriere Copyright © 2006 by Henri Charriere. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 0061120669
- Publisher : William Morrow Paperbacks (August 1, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 576 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780061120664
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061120664
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.92 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #38,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #118 in Crime & Criminal Biographies
- #1,373 in Memoirs (Books)
- #3,382 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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True, Charrière more often than not comes across as a bit of an incarcerated flâneur with a sort of noblesse oblige toward everyone involved, from fellow prisoners to guards, wardens, administrators, the lot. But he has a sense of humour about his own hyperbolic amour-propre which makes it endurable. At one point, faced with a dilemma in this moral code of his, he writes:
"I smiled at the prospect of having to search out an evil policeman with no family. How should I put it to him:'If I kill you, are you sure no one will miss you?'"
Very droll, Papi.
All this aside, what marks this book out from other books of the sort is the detailed descriptions of the torrid conditions of the tropic zone where our hero spends his sentence. They are utterly convincing, and if there's one thing to which everyone agrees it's that, guilty or not, Henri Charrière did spend much of his life on penal colonies such as the Île-Royale, described thus:
"The noon sun was leaden-a tropical sun to boil the brain in your skull; a sun that shrivelled the plants not yet grown strong enough to resist it; a sun that, in a few hours, dried up all but the deepest salt-water pools, leaving only a white film of salt; a sun that set the air to dancing-it literally moved before my eyes-its reflection on the water burning my pupils."
In his second stay in solitary confinement, he pens - perhaps a bit too overtly - a passage worthy of France's greatest writer, who famously confined himself to a cork-lined closet during much of his latter years:
"Such sharp recollections of moments and events fifteen years in the past, and the ability to relive them so intensely, can only be accomplished in a cell where you're cut off from all noise, in the most absolute silence. I can even see the yellow of Aunt Outine's dress. I could hear the wind in the chestnut trees, the dry noise a chestnut makes as it falls on the ground, or its soft thump when it hits a pile of leaves...And there was no one to stop me from rolling around in these memories and drinking in the peace so necessary to my battered soul."
Despite the nod Proust-wards here, there can be no doubt in the reader's mind after finishing the book, despite questions about specifics, that the writer has indeed been battered in soul and in body and seen the very best and the very worst of which humans are capable, and that the reader, vicariously, has done so as well.
As Papillon says about the halfway fictitious explanation of an incident concocted, in order to save their skins and positions, by both guards and prisoners for the administration on one of the colonies:
"It has since remained part legend, part true story."
So with "Papillon" and his harrowing tale of hope amidst the darkest adversity.
The book (with the author’s own emphasis) also explores the humane relations Papillon shared with his cell mates. He was heavy handed with sods but befriended his prison mates easily. He learned to live with the rogues, the dreaded convicts who hacked at moment’s provocation but he never abandoned the meek and the suffering. Papillon made good friends with staff of the prisons where he was grounded (the warders and the gendarmes). They were never repulsed by his obstinacy to break, believed in his innocence and respected his dream to live as a free man. It was this trust that enlivened his spirits and increased his strength to keep his sanity in the lowest ebbs of confinement.
Papillon for me has outlived its reputation. The book makes an appeal to a whole range of men. It cannot be merely looked as the story of the struggle of a convict for freedom. Papillion’s struggle reveals much more than this character; it uncovers a whole process of catharsis. The book has become an obvious and useful addition to the library of many prisons since its printing. It implores people at large to never lose hope while facing an adversity; win or lose, the way of the warrior is the only way to survive.
Charrière emphasises that his will to survive and make a new life for himself was the sole purpose he needed to carry on. During his first escape from the penal settlement, he comes across a Native American tribe on the Guajira Peninsula, Columbia. Initially he is treated as an outsider by the tribe, but over time he earns their trust and is able to connect and even bond with them. He spends only a brief time of six months there, but he later reflects that this simple way of life he participated in was one he would regret leaving for the rest of his life. This theme of civilisation vs. ‘savagery’ is constantly subverted, and at a time where capital punishment was still exercised without mercy, it makes sense that Charrière and others like him found solace in the simpler things.
This tale of one man and his struggle to escape a society that had rejected him is one of toil, and not for the faint hearted. However, it is also an uplifting story that shows the true power of the human spirit, and one that cannot be truly encapsulated in the written word.
I am very happy with this purchase!!!!
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