True Summit by David Roberts Page A

Rébuffat narrated that accident in an oddly dreamy passage. For the poet of the Alps, death was not easy to countenance: on the following day, the guides found their protégé’s corpse lying face up on the glacier.
    The expression on his face was serene. The morning before, as we started up the spur, he had said to me, “Gaston, think of doing the north face of the Grandes Jorasses! I’ve dreamed of this all my life.” And he added with a laugh: “After, I don’t mind dying.”
    What Rébuffat neglects to mention is that at the last minute, he had talked Lachenal out of an easier route. The central spur had been climbed only four times before, never by Frenchmen. Apprised of the formidable objective Rébuffat proposed, the aspirants were at first taken aback; then, swayed by their faith in their tutors, they voiced wholehearted enthusiasm.
    The passage in Lachenal’s Annapurna diary seems to indicate that, three years later, he held Rébuffat at least indirectly responsible for the death of Georges Michel. Perhaps he felt his friend had let personal ambition get the better of his judgment. Whether other peers—including the school’s director, the premier alpinist Jean Franco—were of like mind has escaped the record. (All mention of this debate on the night of April 28, 1950, was expunged from Lachenal’s Carnets published six years later.)
    The posthumous censoring of Lachenal’s diary is so extreme that it cannot be explained simply as stemming from a concern that Lachenal’s version might contradict Herzog’s. Many of the most vivid vignettes having to do with native peoples have been excised. One day Lachenal attends a funeral of another young native girl, at the culmination of which a priest cuts open her corpse “from the vagina to the breasts”; extracts, Lachenal thinks, her liver; then sews the body closed again before burning it on a pyre. In a remote village, the sahibs are offered girls for four rupees apiece. When they turn down the proposition (mainly, Lachenal indicates, “because these were very dirty Tibetans”), the locals offer them young boys. Both scenes were left out of the Carnets as originally published.
    One might argue that such raw vignettes would have been routinely excised by publishers in the 1950s. Yet it is not merely such shocking episodes as the sahibs being offered children for sex that were censored in the Carnets. Most of the common fleshly details that underline the human vulnerability of the teammates—their boils and headaches, their diarrhea and vomiting—were expunged as well. Knights of the sky do not suffer from diarrhea. And any hint of interpersonal conflict, such as Lachenal’s quarrel with Rébuffat over the Grandes Jorasses, was similarly left out.
    On the typescript of the diary that Michel Guérin rescuedfrom oblivion appear the marginal jottings of Lucien Devies and Maurice Herzog. Most of the excision marks bear Devies’s hand. The final pruning and rearranging were done by Gérard Herzog, who was a professional editor.
    When the unexpurgated Carnets appeared in 1996, journalists demanded of Maurice Herzog an explanation of the censoring that took place four decades before. “If none of those passages were published,” he told Montagnes magazine, “it’s because they didn’t interest the editors.”
    One passage “the editors” did not suppress gives the lie to Rébuffat’s intuition that he was the only married team member to miss his wife. On May 16, nearly seven weeks gone from France, Lachenal paused beside a pretty stream in a calcite gorge. “I filled my hand with water, looked at it carefully, then threw it back into the torrent, telling it to evaporate and transport itself in a cloud all the way to Praz where this bit of water might fall on the head of my wife.”
    By May 14, however, such private, happy moments