Literary Picks "Papillon" by Henri Charriere

Author: Edward Pickering

A memoir of imprisonment and escape, "Papillon" ranks among the greatest adventure stories ever written. It took France, then England and America by storm when first published in 1969.
"Papillon" is your summer reading, and you found it right here.
At the age of 25 Frenchman Henri CharriËre, nicknamed "Papillon" ('butterfly'), was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, an upper-world inferno with an 80 percent mortality rate for newly arrived convicts.
Papillon dispenses with his trial - a mockery of justice replete with perjured witnesses, a Machiavellian prosecutor and venal jurymen - in a matter of pages.
He then describes the implacable anger but also stubborn determination that swelled inside him in the days following his sentencing. In a cell in France Papillon determined to serve no more than two years of his life sentence.
At the outset of his South American odyssey, which would eventually encompass 13 years of imprisonment, nine escapes and countless schemes, Papillon demonstrates the iron resolve that later proves to be his most indispensable trait as a fugitive.
The hardships, deprivations and terrors that Papillon suffers will titillate readers who crave high adventure. After his initial escape Papillon is sent to Devil's Island - a hell from which no previous prisoner had ever escaped.
Papillon became the first. His companion in the attempt died a horrific death on the mud flats along the shoreline of the South American mainland. Having beached before Papillon, Sylvain foolishly decides to walk across the flats to aid his friend, parched and beaten by 40 hours of exposure to sun and water.
The death scene, drawn across several pages, is harrowing and representative, in a broad sense, of Papillon's experience in the penal colony - a world in which men die by murder, madness, guard brutality, sharks, heat exhaustion, carnivorous ants and inimical natives.
"I flattened myself again and dug into the mud - it was almost liquid now. My eyes and his were inseparably joined. He shook his head to say no, don't struggle any more. I went on nevertheless and I was less than thirty yards away when a great roller smothered me under its mass of water and very nearly tore me off my sacks-they floated and moved me five or six yards.
When the roller had gone I looked around. Sylvain had vanished. The mud, with its thin layer of foaming water, was perfectly smooth. There was not even my friend's hand showing to say a last farewell. I had an utterly disgusting, brutish reaction, the instinct for self-preservation overcoming all decent feeling. 'You're alive, Papi.'"
A tremendous story that moves at galloping pace, "Papillon" reads "as a masterpiece of oral literature." Charriere, not a scribe, writes colloquially and quickly.
The story itself, like the indomitable spirit of the man who recounts it, brooks no fluff, no pretense. Charriere produced an epic adventure, vivid and truthful.