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,