Documento Chatarra

Papillion

by Henri Charrière

To the Venezuelan people, to the humble fishermen in the Gulf of Paria, to everybody-the intellectuals, the military and all the others-who gave me the chance to live again, and to Rita, my wife and dearest friend.

Introduction

This book would probably never have been written if, in July 1967-the year of the big earthquake there--a young man of sixty hadnot read about Albertine Sarrazin in the Caracas newspapers. This small black diamond of a woman who had been all sparkle, laughter and courage, had just died. She was known all over the world for three books she had written in just over a year, two of them about her cavales and her life in prison.
The man's name was Henri Charrière and he had come a long way. From the bagne in Cayenne, to beprecise, where he'd been sent in 1933. He had lived outside the law, to be sure, but he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder he hadn't committed.
Henri Charrière--called Papillon in the underworld--was born to a family of teachers in Ardèche in 1906. French by birth, he is now Venezuelan. For the people of Venezuela chose to be impressed by his manner and his word rather than byhis criminal record, and judged that the thirteen years he had spent struggling to escape from the horrors of the bagne were more eloquent of his future than of his past.
In July 1967, Charrière went to the French bookshop in Caracas and bought L'Astragale. Until then it had never occurred to him to write a line about his own adventures. He was a man of action who loved life. He had great warmth,a sharp eye and the rich and somewhat gravelly voice of a man from the Midi. You can listen to him for hours because he tells stories like--well, like all the great storytellers. Thus the miracle happened: following the example of Albertine Sarrazin, with no contacts and free of any literary ambition (in his letter to me he said, "Here are my adventures: have a professional write them up"), hewrote the way you tell a story. You see him, you feel him, you live his life, and if it's your bad luck to have to stop at the bottom of a page just when he's telling you that he's about to go to the toilets (a place that has a multiple and important function in the bagne), you find yourself forced to turn the page because it's no longer Charrière who is going there, but you yourself.
Three daysafter he had finished reading L'Astragaie, he wrote at one sitting the first two sections in a student's spiral notebook. He stopped long enough to get some advice about this new adventure-probably more astonishing to him than all the others that had come before; then at the start of 1968 launched into the rest. In two months he had finished all thirteen notebooks.
As with Albertine, hismanuscript arrived by mail, in September. Charrière was in Paris three weeks later. I had published Albertine with Jean-Jacques Pauvert, and that is why Charrière entrusted his book to me.
The book was written in the white heat of recollection, then typed by enthusiastic amateurs not too familiar with French, but I altered virtually nothing. I corrected the punctuation here and there, amended a fewSpanishisms. that were too obscure, and corrected some confusions of meaning and an occasional inversion that stemmed from the fact that the everyday language of Caracas comprises three or four dialects that can only be learned by ear.
As for its authenticity, I can vouch for it. Obviously, after thirty years, some of the details had become blurred and modified by memory. As for the background facts,you need only read Professor Devèze's book entitled Cayenne (Juilliard's Collected Archives, 1965) to be convinced that Charrière did not exaggerate either the way of life in the bagne or its horror. Quite the opposite.
As a matter of principle, we changed the names of all the bagnards, guards and wardens in the penal colonies. The purpose of the book was not to attack individuals but to...