Henri Charrière
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Henri Charrière (Ardèche, France, 16 November 1906 - Madrid, Spain, 29 July 1973) was a convicted felon chiefly known as the author of Papillon, a memoir of his incarceration in a penal colony on French Guiana.
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[edit] Conviction and imprisonment
Charrière was a member of the Paris underworld, framed for the murder of a pimp, Roland le Petit. He was convicted and sentenced to hard labour for life on 26 October 1931. After a brief imprisonment in Caen he was sent to the penal colony in French Guiana where his extraordinary story was to truly begin.
[edit] First escape
In 1933, Charrière successfully escaped from a hospital on the mainland with two companions, Clousiot and Maturette, sailing along the coast via Trinidad and Curaçao to Riohacha in Colombia, receiving help along the way from a remarkable island of lepers, a compassionate British family and several others. During this time, they would accept two other escapees to join their trio, and they were later let off in Colombia.
Poor weather would not allow them to leave the Colombian coast though, and they were all recaptured and imprisoned; Charrière managed to escape with the aid of a fellow prisoner and, after several days and nights of putting distance between themselves and the prison, they went their separate ways; Charrière would soon come upon the region of Guajira. Here he spent several months living in a native village of pearl divers, for a young woman and her sister fell in love with him and later became his wives and the mothers of his children. It was here that he spent several paradisaic months of "the purest form of love and beauty", but driven to set to rights the injustice he was served, he eventually left and headed westward.
Fortune's wheel was to turn, though, and Charrière was captured and imprisoned at Santa Marta, and later transferred to Barranquilla where he was unexpectedtly reunited with Clousiot and Maturette. In spite of numerous astounding escape attempts (one of which resulted in him breaking the arches of his feet; he was to be flat-footed ever after), Charrière was unable to free himself from these prisons and was extradited back to French Guiana in 1934 along with his two comrades.
For the escape Charrière spent two years in solitary confinement, darkly nicknamed the "Devourer of Men" by the island convicts, on the island of Saint-Joseph. The trio were originally sentenced to five years, with the other three years added on for attempted murder charges because of the guards they knocked out in order to escape the hospital, but he was able to prove that the claims were false, thus resulting in the shorter two year sentence. His friends Clousiot and Maturette received the same fate, which ended with Clousiot's tragic death, mere days after the trio's sentence had ended. Upon release Charrière was transferred to the island of Royale, where another escape attempt was foiled by an informer.
Charrière was condemned to eight years, a sentence nearly impossible to survive, in solitary confinement for the escape attempt and the murder of the informer. He was freed from solitary after only nineteen months, after selflessly attempting to save a drowning little girl, Lissette, in shark infested waters, but because of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding his release from solitary, it was documented that he was let go for medical reasons.
Next, Charrière feigned madness (having determined typical symptoms showed by those diagnosed with such madness) in an attempt to escape from the island's mental hospital, which wasn't nearly as heavily guarded. Another reason for wanting to try to escape from the mental hospital, an important one, was, because of the start of the second World War, the punishment for attempted escape was now death for treason, reasoning that any man attempting to escape was trying to defect to the enemy. A person considered mad is viewed as someone in no control of their actions, thereby making it impossible to punish them for anything -- even escaping.
Unfortunately, this escape attempt would prove fruitless, with Charrière being almost dashed to bits against cliff rocks and his companion drowning.
[edit] Escape from Devil's Island
After spending some time "regaining his sanity", Charrière requested to be transferred to Devil's Island. Authorities were more than happy to oblige, for it was Devil's Island that was said to be inconceivable to escape from. It was there that he finally succeeded; after deciding that all his past attempts were too complicated, too elaborate, that flinging himself into the ocean from a cliff with a bag of coconuts as a raft and drifting into the arms of Fate was what it would have to be.
Having spent much time studying the ocean, Charrière discovered that the waves rolled in a particular succession and that every seventh wave appeared much larger and more powerful than the others, and that it might be enough to push him into the sea far out enough to not be pulled back in. After several experiments with weighted down sacks of coconuts, he finally decided that this is what it would have to be. He named the seventh wave that would carry him out to freedom Lissette, after the little girl whose life he had tried to save, actions that resulted in his vicious sentence of eight years in solitary to be cut short after 19 months.
Charrière convinced a fellow convict, Sylvain, that as terrifying as the idea of what he wanted to do seemed, the plan would work perfectly, and it did. He and Sylvain, drifting on his own bag of coconuts, spent four days and three nights adrift in the sea, surviving on grated coconut pulp and sheer will. Sadly, Sylvain didn't survive; a mere three hundred yards from the promised land, Sylvain prematurely left his raft and sank into the mud-flat's quicksands, disappearing as the waves washed over his softening trap; Charrière waited until the waves pushed his raft to solid shoreline.
Eventually having reached the mainland, Charrière came in contact with an elder Chinese by the name of Cuic Cuic, made known to him before he escaped Devil's Island by Cuic Cuic's brother. Charrière joined Cuic Cuic in his refuge, and together (also in the company of a one-armed friend) they escaped by boat to Georgetown. Even though he could have lived there as a free man, he and five others later continued by sea to Venezuela, where they were captured and imprisoned in El Dorado Prison (a small gold mining town that was named after the mythical gold city of El Dorado) where he was shocked to see the way prisoners were treated, as he felt, in a manner similar to the way the French treated convicts in the galleys of the 18th and 19th century. Charrière was finally freed on 18 October 1945. He chose to live in Venezuela. He remained a fugitive from French justice until his death from throat cancer.
[edit] Papillon
His 1970 best-selling book, Papillon, details his alleged numerous escapes, attempted escapes, adventures and recaptures from his imprisonment in 1932 to his final escape to Venezuela, where he became a resident in 1945, married, and opened a restaurant in Caracas. The book's title is Charrière's nickname, derived from a butterfly tattoo on his chest (papillon being French for butterfly). The veracity of his account has been questioned, but he always maintained that, excepting minor lapses in memory, it was true.
Modern researchers, however, believe that Charrière got much of his story material from other inmates, and see the work as more fictionalized than a true autobiography. In 2005, a 104-year-old man in Paris, Charles Brunier, claimed to be the real Papillon. Modern critics tend to agree that Charrière's depictions included events that happened to others, and that Brunier was at the prison at the same time.[citation needed]
[edit] See also
Banco : Sequel to Papillon
