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.

[edit] Conviction and imprisonment

Charrière, a member of the Paris underworld, was convicted of the murder of a pimp, Roland le Petit, a charge which he claimed was false. He was 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.

[edit] First escape

In 1933, Charrière successfully escaped from a hospital on the mainland with two companions, Clousiot and Maturette, and sailed along the coast via Trinidad and Curaçao to Riohacha. In Colombia, they received help along the way from a remarkable island of lepers, a compassionate British family and many others. During this time, three additional escapees joined the trio on their journey to Colombia.

Poor weather prevented them from leaving the Colombian coast 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. He had a relationship with a young woman and her sister and they later became his wives and the mothers of his children. It was here that he spent several rapturous months of "the purest form of love and beauty". Yet he was driven to correct the injustice he experienced so he eventually left and headed westward.

Once again, Charrière was captured and imprisoned at Santa Marta, and later transferred to Barranquilla where he was unexpectedly 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.

Charrière spent two years in solitary confinement, fearfully nicknamed the "Devourer of Men" by the island convicts, on the island of Saint-Joseph. The trio were originally sentenced to five years, with three additional years added for the attempted murder of the hospital guards they knocked out in their escape attempt. Charriere 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, in solitary confinement for the escape attempt and the murder of the informer. However, he was freed from solitary after only nineteen months, after risking his life in an attempt to save a drowning little girl named Lissette, in shark infested waters. It was documented that he was released for "medical reasons" considering the extremely dangerous conditions of this rescue attempt.

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 was leniently guarded. It was an ideal time to make an escape from the mental hospital because after the start of World War II punishment for escape attempts was now elevated to death on the charges of treason. The rationale was that anyone attempting escape was trying to defect to the enemy. A mad person was viewed as someone who was not in control of their own actions, thereby making it impossible to punish them for anything—including escaping.

Unfortunately, this escape attempt would fail. Charrière and his companion were close to being dashed to bits against cliff rocks and left to drown.

[edit] Escape from Devil's Island

After "regaining his sanity", Charrière requested to be transferred to Devil's Island. Authorities were happy to oblige because Devil's Island was said to be inescapable. During his sentence on Devil's Island he decided that all of his past escape attempts were too complex. His new simplified plan would be to fling himself into the ocean from a cliff using a bag of coconuts as his raft.

In preliminary preparation for his escape, Charrière observed that the waves rolled in a particular succession. Every seventh wave appeared much larger and stronger than the others, and the seventh wave might be enough to push him far away from the island and into the deep ocean. After several experiments with weighted down sacks of coconuts, he named the seventh wave Lisette after the little girl he risked his life to save.

Charrière convinced Sylvain, a fellow convict, to accompany him on his escape. He and Sylvain spent four days and three nights adrift in the sea, floating on coconut-filled bags and surviving on grated coconut pulp. Unfortunately, Sylvain prematurely left his raft and sank into the mud-flat's quicksands, disappearing as the waves washed over his softening trap; he was a mere three hundred yards from the promised land. Charrière waited until the waves pushed his raft to solid shoreline.

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 settled 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 up 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: The sequel to Papillon