Travels with Papi

By Timothy Foote

PAPILLON by Henri Charriere. 434 pages. William Morrow. $8.95.

Even his underworld name is perfect: Papillon--because he has a butterfly tattooed on his chest.

His real-life scenario begins in Paris, on Montmartre in 1930. At 23, he is a suave breaker of hearts and a slick cracker of safes. Suddenly, he is framed for a murder he did not commit and sentenced to prison for life--or "perpetuity" as the French, knowing their own penal system, more realistically put it. Shuffled off to French Guiana, he tries to break out nine times. On the first escape, he makes it 1,800 miles to Colombia in an open boat, staying free for eleven months before being caught and returned to the penal colony.

Over the years, other attempts come to grief more quickly. His pal's belt buckle catches noisily on the edge of a zinc roof at the key moment. An American sleeping potion administered to a guard fails to work in time. Months are spent in building a raft, piece by piece and then storing it in a grave, only to have a fellow prisoner squeal. But Papillon still has money, left from more than 10,000 underworld francs that he put in a plan, a small, polished, waterproof metal tube, harbored in his lower intestine. Papillon is also stirred by dreams of revenge as well as a longing to go straight and start a new life. Sent to solitary for two years, he performs a prison miracle: surviving without going mad. His pals smuggle extra food to him. He methodically exercises his memory while pacing his cell up to eleven hours a day to keep in shape. Finally, in 1941, Papillon escapes definitively, floating away from Devil's Island on a pair of tide-driven bags stuffed with coconuts to serve as food and floatation. End Part I, nearly all of Papillon's story covered in this book.

Total Recall. Part II is set in Venezuela. Papillon becomes an honest citizen. He marries and works variously as gold prospector, nightclub manager, fireman, bush-league dentist, commercial shrimp fisherman. More than 20 years pass. It is 1967. He is over 60 now, and down on his luck. He reads a book of prison memoirs by an Algerian-born lady ex-con named Albertine Sarrazin. Hastily, he buys 13 school notebooks. In a few months, apparently with near total recall, he scribbles Part I (1931 to 1945) in longhand and mails it to Sarrazin's editors in Paris. Called Papillon (what else?) and barely touched by an editor's pencil, it sells 1,000,000 copies in France, setting a new French record. It is sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club in the U.S. (this November's selection) and, at an estimated $1,000,000, is contracted for the largest first printing in Pocket Books' history (close to 3,000,000 copies). It is a Reader's Digest Condensed Book for the fall. Film rights are bought for more than $500,000. Papillon has become a light industry.

Meanwhile, thinly disguised as an ex-con named Henri Charriere, who manages to resemble both the late Robert Benchley and not-so-early George Raft, Papillon the man has turned up in Paris to promote Papillon the book. He is photographed with Brigitte Bardot. For Paris Match, he revisits French Guiana and poses in the crumbling cells of the now abandoned penal colony. "Would you like to come back to France for good?" a reporter asks him. "France is my blood," says Papillon, with that terse flair that never seems to desert him. "Venezuela is my heaven." Two books are written attacking Papillon. One claims the author was not really much of a safecracker after all. The other suggests that his book is full of errors. "I didn't go into that hell with a typewriter," snaps Papillon. Then he is off for America, where this week his book is being published with some fanfare.

How Papillon will fare in the New World is not entirely clear. Its author will surely grow richer and more famous, but he may not be read so avidly as he was in France. As a man he seems both hard to dislike or profoundly distrust. But his story often seems too good to be true, and raises the question of just how much Sunday supplemental escapee-from-Devil's Island experience he has incorporated as his own. For example, on one cavale (escape) he gets help from an island full of lepers, and when one hands him some coffee, a whole diseased finger comes off and sticks to the bowl.

Thrilling adventure tales are to a large extent translation-proof. But the French colloquially use words like noble and ignoble that in English (and in a rather stodgy translation, too) sometimes make Papillon sound a little like The Rover Boys on Land and Sea. Perhaps more important, the kind of sympathy for Papillon that helped the book so much in France is based on a peculiarly Gallic preoccupation with justice miscarried. For years, France has treated men charged with crimes as guilty until proved innocent, and generally looked upon prison as a place that prisoners should either not survive or, failing that, be taught never to risk entering again. Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean --sentenced in perpetuity as the result of a petty theft, remorselessly pursued by the forces of the law, redeeming himself by acts of courage and charity--is a French epic hero. Alfred Dreyfus is his counterpart in the real world of politics and treason. Few American readers will feel Gallic tremors of empathy when Papillon sits on Dreyfus' very bench as he plots escape from Devil's Island, or when, in a Hugo-like episode, he risks his life trying to save a warden's tiny daughter fallen among sharks.

Pimps and Pirates. What will be going for Papillon in the U.S. is its strain of fashionable neoRomanticism. Particularly when extolling the simplicity of the Indians with whom he lived for more than six months in 1934, Papillon offers Rousseauesque passages damning society and praising the noble savage. Indeed, the book is profoundly optimistic about human nature. Its pages are crowded with pimps, pirates and murderers. But, except for those who cruelly serve the prison system, they live in a subsociety marked by a degree of order and a scrupulousness that often goes far enough beyond "honor among thieves" to be of interest to, say, Konrad Lorenz.

The book's best promoter will be Charriere himself. He is already at work on a sequel to be called Papillon Comes Back--1945 to 1969. So much for Part II. What happens to him as a TV personality in the U.S. will properly belong to Part III, if he ever chooses to write it. Since he is evidently a man of charm, energy and perhaps genius, almost anything could happen. Maybe he will end up marrying Zsa Zsa Gabor or run for Governor of New York. On the track record, both the lady and the state might do worse.

. Timothy Foote

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