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Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon
Henri Charrière
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1974
First published in Great Britain by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd 1973
Copyright © Editions Robert Laffont, S. A. 1972
This translation copyright © Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd 1973
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780586040102
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007378890 Version: 2016-02-26
To the memory of Dr Alex Guibert-Germain, to Madame Alex Guibert-Germain, to my countrymen, the Venezuelans, to my French, Spanish, Swiss, Belgian, Italian, Yugoslav, German, English, Greek, American, Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, Israeli, Swedish, Czechoslovak, Danish, Argentine, Colombian, and Brazilian friends and all those friends who are faceless but who have done me the honour of writing to me.
‘What you think of yourself matters more than what others think of you.’
(author unknown to Papillon)
Contents
9: Maracaibo: among the Indians
MIDDLE-AGED, impoverished by an earthquake and worried about his future, Henri Charrière sat down to write a book to restore his fortunes: it was his first, and he called it Papillon, the name by which he had been known in the underworld of Paris and in the French penal settlements. He had no great opinion of himself as an author and he was quite willing to have it improved, cut about and put into ‘good French’; but the first publisher he sent it to happened to employ a brilliant editor who at once realized the exceptional quality of the manuscript and who delivered it to an astonished public in its original state, merely tidying up the punctuation, the spelling and a very few points of style.
That was in 1970, the year of the phénomène Papillon, a phenomenon almost unparalleled in the annals of publishing: it was not only that an extraordinary number of people read the book (850,000 copies were sold in the first few months), but that the readers embraced the whole spectrum of literary opinion, from the Académie Française to those whose lips moved slowly as they made their fascinated way through the strange adventures of an indomitable man struggling against the society that had sent him to rot in the infamous tropical prisons of Guiana with a life-sentence for a murder that he had never committed.
They were all deeply moved by the burning sense of injustice that runs right through the book and that gives it its coherence and validity, but even more by Papillon’s sheer narrative power, his innate genius for telling a story. ‘This is a literary prodigy,’ said François Mauriac. ‘It is utterly fascinating reading…This new colleague of ours is a master!’ And he pointed out that it was not enough to have been a transported convict and to have escaped again and again; extraordinary talent was required to give the book its ring of truth and to make its value ‘exactly proportional to its immense success’.
The soundness of Mauriac’s words can be seen not only from the immense quantities of hopeless manuscripts by other ex-prisoners (purple characters, but untouched by genius) that flow into publishers’ offices every week, but also by the baldness of the following summary that is intended to put the reader