HENRI CHARRIÈRE

Papillon

Translated from the French by

PATRICK O’BRIAN

To the people of Venezuela, to the humble fishermen of the Gulf of Paria, to all those, intellectuals, soldiers and others who gave me my chance to make a new life.

To Rita, my wife, my best friend.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Translator’s Introduction

First Exercise-Book: Down the Drain

Second Exercise-Book: On the way to Guiana

Third Exercise-Book: First Break

Fourth Exercise-Book: First Break (continued)

Fifth Exercise-Book: Back to Civilization

Sixth Exercise-Book: The Iles du Salut

Seventh Exercise-Book: The Iles du Salut

Eighth Exercise-Book: Back to Royale

Ninth Exercise-Book: Saint-Joseph

Tenth Exercise-Book: Devil’s Island

Eleventh Exercise-Book: Farewell to Penal

Twelfth Exercise-Book: Georgetown

Thirteenth Exercise-Book: Venezuela

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Translator’s Introduction

All this last year France has been talking about Papillon, about the phènomène Papillon, which is not merely the selling of very large numbers of an unusually long book, but the discovery of a new world and the rediscovery of a kind of direct, intensely living narrative that has scarcely ever been seen since literature became self-conscious.

The new world in question is of course the underworld, seen from within and described with extraordinary natural talent by one who knows it through and through and who accepts its values, which include among others courage, loyalty and fortitude. But this is the real underworld, as different from the underworld of fiction as the act of love is different from adolescent imaginings, a world the French have scarcely seen except here and there in the works of Jean Genet and Albertine Sarrazin, or the English since Defoe; and its startling fierce uncompromising reality, savagely contemptuous of the Establishment, has shocked and distressed many a worthy bourgeois. Indeed, we have a minister’s word for it (a minister, no less) that the present hopeless moral decline of France is due to the wearing of miniskirts and to the reading of Papillon.

Nevertheless all properly equipped young women are still wearing miniskirts, in spite of the cold, and even greater numbers of Frenchmen with properly equipped minds are still reading Papillon, in spite of the uncomfortable feelings it must arouse from time to time. And this is one of the most striking things about the phénomène Papillon: the book makes an immense appeal to the whole range of men of good will, from the Academie française to the cheerful young mason who is working on my house. The literary men are the most articulate in their praise, and I will quote from François Mauriac, the most literary and articulate of them all, for his praise sums up all the rest and expresses it better. This piece comes from his Bloc-notes in the Figaro littéraire.

I had heard that it was a piece of oral literature, but I do not agree at all: no, even on the literary plane I think it an extraordinary talented book. I have believed that there is no great success, no overwhelming success, that is undeserved. It always has a deep underlying reason…I think that Papillon’s immense success is in exact proportion to the book’s worth and to what the author has lived through. But another man who had had the same life and had experienced the same adventures would have produced nothing from it at all. This is a literary prodigy. Merely having been a transported convict and having escaped does not mean a thing: you have to have talent to give this tale its ring of truth. It is utterly fascinating reading. This new colleague of ours is a master!

A thing that struck me very much in the book is that this man, sentenced for a killing that he did not commit…takes a very sanguine view of mankind. At the beginning of his first escape he was taken in and given shelter on a lepers’ island. The charity these most unfortunate, most forsaken of men showed to the convicts is truly wonderful. And it was the lepers who saw to it that they were saved. The same applies to the way they were welcomed in Trinidad and at Curaçao, not as criminals but as men who deserved admiration for having made that voyage aboard a nutshell. There is this human warmth all round them, and all through the book we never forget it. How different from those bitter, angry, disgusted books – Céline’s, for example.

Man’s highest virtues are to be found in what is called the gutter, the underworld; and what gangsters do is sometimes the same as what heroes do. I have already confessed that when I am very low in my mind I read detective stories. In these books, where everything is made up, the human aspect of the characters, the ‘humanity’, is appalling. But in Papillon’s tale, which is true, we meet a humanity that we love in spite of its revolting side. This book is a good book, in the deep meaning of the word.

When one has read a little way into Papillon one soon comes to recognize the singular truthfulness of the writing, but at first some readers, particularly English readers, wonder whether such things can be; and so that no time, no pleasure, should be lost, a certain amount of authentication may be in place.

Henri Charrière was born in 1906, in the Ardèche, a somewhat remote district in the south of France where his father was the master of a village school. After doing his military service in the navy, Charrière went to Paris, where, having acquired the nickname of Papillon, he soon carved himself out a respected place in the underworld: he had an intuitive perception of its laws and standards, and he respected them scrupulously. Papillon was not a killer at that time, but he fell foul of the police and when he was taken up on the charge of murdering a ponce he was convicted. The perjury of a witness for the prosecution, the thick stupidity of the jury, the utter inhumanity of the prosecuting counsel, and the total injustice of the sentence maddened him, for like many of his friends he had a far more acute sense of justice than is usual in the bourgeois world. What is more, the sentence was appallingly severe – transportation to the penal settlements in French Guiana and imprisonment for life without a hope of remission: and all this at the age of twenty-five. He swore he would not serve it, and he did not serve it. This book is an account of his astonishing escapes from an organization that was nevertheless accustomed to holding on to thousands of very tough and determined men, and of the adventures that were the consequences of his escapes. But it is also a furious protest against a society that can use human beings so, that can reduce them to despair and that can for its own convenience shut them up in dim concrete cells with bars only at the top, there to live in total silence upon a starvation diet until they are tamed, driven mad or physically destroyed – killed. The horrible, absolutely convincing account of his years in solitary confinement is very deeply moving indeed.

After years on the run, years of being taken and then escaping again even though he was on the ‘very dangerous’ list, Papillon finally got away from Devil’s Island itself, riding over many miles of sea to the mainland on a couple of sacks filled with coconuts. He managed to reach Venezuela, and eventually the Venezuelans gave him his chance, allowing him to become a Venezuelan citizen and to settle down to live in Caracas as quietly as his fantastic vitality would allow.

It was here that he chanced upon Albertine Sarrazin’s wonderful l‘Astragale in a French bookshop. He read it. The red band round the cover said 123rd thousand, and Papillon said, ‘It’s pretty good: but if that chick, just going from hideout to hideout with that broken bone of hers, could sell 123,000 copies, why, with my thirty years of adventures, I’ll sell three times as many.’ He bought two schoolboys’ exercise books with spiral bindings and in two days he filled them. He bought eleven more, and in a couple of months they too were full.

It is perhaps this extraordinary flow that accounts for some of the unique living quality of the book. A professional writer who puts down between one and two thousand words a day is doing very well: Papillon must have written about five thousand a day, and the result is very like the flow of a practised raconteur – indeed the book has been called a masterpiece of oral literature, and although this is not Mauriac’s view, with the utmost diffidence I (having lived with Papillon for months) venture to agree with it.

As luck would have it the manuscript was sent to Jean-Pierre Castelnau, the publisher who had discovered Albertine Sarrazin; and here I quote from his preface.

His manuscript reached me in September. Three weeks later Charrière was in Paris. Jean-Jacques Pauvert and I had launched Albertine: Charrière entrusted me with his book…

I have left this book, poured red-hot from his glowing memory and typed by various enthusiastic but not always very French hands, virtually untouched. All I have done is to put some order into the punctuation, change a few almost incomprehensible Spanish turns of phrase, and straighten out certain muddles and inversions that arise from his daily use of three or four different languages in Caracas, all learnt by ear.

I can vouch for the basic authenticity of the book. Charrière came to Paris twice and we talked a great deal. Whole days: and some nights too. Clearly, in thirty years some details may have grown dim and memory may have altered others. They are not of any importance. As for the background, one has but to glance at Professor Devèze’s Cayenne (Collection Archives, Julliard, 1965) to see that Charrière has by no means exaggerated either the way of life and morality of the penal settlement or its horror. Far from it.

As a matter of principle we have changed the names of all the convicts, warders and governors of the prison service, this book’s intention being not to attack individuals but to describe given characters and a given community. We have done the same with the dates: some are exact, others merely give a general notion of the period. That is all that is required.

Perhaps I should add something about the translation of the book. To begin with it was one of the hardest I have ever undertaken, partly because Papillon could not get into his stride, and I had to stumble along with him, for I resent ‘improvements’ in translation – they do not seem to me right. (Once, in one of my own novels, an Italian translator improved a difficult poem right out of existence.) And then there was the problem of his slang: Papillon does not use very much – nothing to compare with Albertine Sarrazin or Céline, for example – and it offers no great difficulty from the point of view of comprehension; but what he does use is strongly alive, far more immediate and personal than the comparatively limited vocabulary of the English underworld. So I was obliged to draw upon the more copious and vivid American: but then Papillon’s prison days were in the thirties and forties, so the slang had to belong to that period. Occasionally I have fallen into anachronism rather than sacrifice vividness, but on the whole I think the language, particularly the dialogue, is a reasonably faithful reflection of the original. Then again there was the question of obscenities. French of course makes a very free use of expressions such as con and merde whose literal equivalents are less often heard in English and therefore have a rather stronger effect; but on the other hand no one can be so simple as to suppose that thousands of ill-treated convicts herded together sound anything like a Sunday-school, so I have tried to steer between unnecessary grossness and inaccurate insipidity.

By the time I had settled these points Papillon had thoroughly hit his stride, and then I found that the best way of following his breakneck pace was to keep up with him. It is a pace that I am used to, for I have lived half my life among the most loquacious people in France, and although I could not translate quite as fast as Papillon wrote, I still finished the book in three months, treating it (to use Jean-Pierre Castelnau’s words) as the flow of ‘a sunlit, rather husky southern voice that you can listen to for hours on end’. And I may say that although in places it was tough going, all in all it was one of the most full and rewarding experiences in a literary life that has not been sparing in delights.

PATRICK O’BRIAN

Collioure, 1970

First Exercise-Book Down the Drain
The Assizes

The blow was such a stunner that it was thirteen years before I could get back on to my feet again. It was not the usual kind of blow either, and they clubbed together to let me have it.

This was 26 October 1931. At eight in the morning they had taken me out of my cell in the Conciergerie – the cell I had been living in for the past year. I was well shaved and well dressed: I looked as smooth as they come in my made-to-measure suit and white shirt with a pale-blue bow-tie to add the finishing touch.

I was twenty-five and I looked twenty. The gendarmes were rather impressed by my posh clothes, and they treated me civilly. They even took off the handcuffs. There we were, all six of us, the five gendarmes and me, sitting on two benches in a bare room. A dreary sky outside. The door opposite us must lead into the assize-court, for this building, this Paris building, was the Palais de Justice of the Seine.

In a few moments I was to be indicted for wilful homicide. My counsel, Maître Raymond Hubert, came in to see me. ‘There’s no solid evidence against you: I fully expect us to be acquitted.’ That ‘us’ made me smile. Anyone would have thought that Maître Hubert was going to appear in the dock too, and that if the verdict was guilty he too would have to serve time.

An usher opened the door and told us to come in. With four gendarmes round me and the sergeant to one side, I made my entrance through the wide-open double doors into an enormous court-room. They had done the whole place up in red, blood red, so as to hand me out this crushing blow – all red, the carpets, the curtains at the big windows and even the robes of the judges who were going to deal with me in two or three minutes’ time.

‘Gentlemen, the court!’

In single file six men appeared through a door on the right. The president of the court and then five other lawyers with their official hats, their toques, on their heads. The presiding judge stopped at the seat in the middle and his colleagues arranged themselves to the right and the left. There was an impressive silence in the room, and everybody was standing up, including me. The court took its seat, and so did everybody else.

The president was a fat-faced man with pink cheeks and a cold eye; he looked straight at me without letting any sort of feeling show. His name was Bevin. When things were under way he ran the trial fairly and he made it clear to one and all that as a professional lawyer he was not sure that either the witnesses or the police were all that straight. No: he had no responsibility for the crusher: all he did was to pass it on to me.

The public prosecutor was a lawyer called Pradel, and all the barristers were frightened of him. He had the evil reputation of sending more victims to the guillotine and the convict prisons in France and overseas than any other man.

Pradel stood for the vindication of society. He was the official prosecutor and there was nothing human about him. He represented the Law, the scales of justice: he was the one who handled them, and he did everything he possibly could to make them come down on the right side for him. He lowered the lids over his vulturish eyes and stared at me piercingly from his full height. From the height of his rostrum in the first place, which made him tower over me, and then from his own natural height, an arrogant six feet. He did not take off his red robe, but he put his toque down in front of him, and he leaned on his two great ham-sized hands. There was a gold ring to show he was married, and a ring on his little finger made of a highly polished horseshoe nail.

He leant over a little so as to dominate me all the more, and he looked as though he were saying, ‘If you think you can get away from me, young cock, you’ve got it wrong. My hands may not look like talons, but there are claws in my heart that are going to rip you to pieces. And the reason why all the barristers are afraid of me, the reason why the judges think the world of me as a dangerous prosecutor, is that I never let my prey escape. It’s nothing to do with me whether you’re guilty or innocent: all I’m here for is to make use of everything that can be said against you – your disreputable, shiftless life in Montmartre, the evidence the police have worked up and the statements of the police themselves. What I am to do is to take hold of all the disgusting filth piled up by the investigating magistrate and manage to make you look so revolting that the jury will see that you vanish from the community.’ Either I was dreaming or I could hear him perfectly distinctly: this man-eater really shook me. ‘Prisoner at the bar, just you keep quiet, and above all don’t you attempt to defend yourself. I’ll send you down the drain, all right. And I trust you’ve no faith in the jury? Don’t you kid yourself. Those twelve men know nothing whatsoever about life. Look at them, lined up there opposite you. Twelve bastards brought up to Paris from some perishing village in the country: can you see them clearly? Small shopkeepers, pensioners, tradesmen. It’s not worth describing them to you in detail. Surely you don’t expect them to understand the life you lead in Montmartre or what it’s like to be twenty-five? As far as they’re concerned Pigalle and the Place Blanche are exactly the same as hell and all night-birds are the natural enemies of society. They are all unspeakably proud of being jurymen at the Seine Assizes. And what’s more, I can tell you that they loathe their status – they loathe belonging to the pinched, dreary lower middle class. And now you make your appearance here, all young and handsome. Do you really suppose for a moment that I’m not going to make them see you as a night-prowling Montmartre Don Juan? That will put them dead against you right away. You’re too well dressed: you ought to have come in something very modest indeed. That was a huge tactical error of yours. Can’t you see how jealous of your suit they are? They all buy their clothes off the peg – they’ve never even dreamt of having a suit made to measure by a tailor.’

Ten o’clock, and we were all ready for the trial to start. Six official lawyers there in front of me, one of them a fierce, driving prosecutor who was going to use all his Machiavellian strength and all his intelligence to convince these twelve innocents that in the first place I was guilty and in the second that the only proper sentence was either penal servitude or the guillotine.

I was to be tried for the killing of a pimp, a police-informer belonging to the Montmartre underworld. There was no proof, but the cops (who get credit every time they find out who has committed a crime) were going to swear blind that I was guilty. Seeing they had no proof, they said they had ‘confidential’ information that left the matter in no doubt. The strongest piece of the prosecution’s evidence was a witness they had primed, a human gramophone-record manufactured at 36 quai des Orfèvres, their headquarters – a guy by the name of Polein. At one point, when I was saying over and over again that I did not know him, the president very fairly asked me, ‘You say this witness is lying. Very well. But why should he want to lie?’

‘Monsieur le President, I’ve had sleepless nights ever since I was arrested, but not out of remorse for having killed Roland le Petit, because I never did it. It’s because I keep trying to make out what kind of motive this witness can have for attacking me so ferociously and for bringing fresh evidence to support the charge every time it seems to weaken. I’ve come to the conclusion, Monsieur le President, that the police picked him up in the act of committing some serious crime and that they made a bargain with him – we’ll forget it, so long as you denounce Papillon.’

At the time I didn’t think I was so close to the truth. A few years later this Polein, who had been held up at the assizes as an honest man with no criminal record, was arrested and found guilty of peddling cocaine.

Maître Hubert tried to defend me, but he was not up to the size of the prosecutor. Maître Bouffay, with his warm-hearted indignation, was the only one to make Pradel struggle for a while. But it didn’t last, and the prosecutor’s skill soon got him on top again. What’s more, he flattered the jury, who swelled with pride at being treated as equals and as colleagues by this awe-inspiring character.

By eleven o’clock at night the game of chess was over. It was checkmate for my counsel. And I, an innocent man – I was found guilty.

In the person of Pradel, the public prosecutor, Society wiped out a young man of twenty-five for the term of his natural life. And none of your reductions, thank you very much! It was the president, Bevin, who handed me out this overflowing dish.

‘Prisoner, stand up,’ he said in a toneless voice.

I got to my feet. There was a complete silence in the court; people were holding their breath, and my heart beat a little faster. Some jurymen watched me; others hung their heads; they looked ashamed.

‘Prisoner, since the jury has answered yes to all the questions except for that of premeditation, you are sentenced to undergo penal servitude for life. Have you anything to say?’

I did not flinch; I stood there naturally; all I did was to grip the bar of the dock a little harder. ‘Yes, Monsieur le President: what I have to say is that I am truly innocent and that I am the victim of a plot worked up by the police.’ I heard a murmur from the place where there were some fashionably-dressed women, distinguished visitors, sitting behind the judges. Without raising my voice I said to them, ‘Shut up, you rich women who come here for dirty thrills. The farce is over. A murder has been solved by your clever police and your system of justice – you’ve had what you came for.’

‘Warders,’ said the President, ‘take the prisoner away.’

Before I vanished I heard a voice calling out, ‘Don’t you worry, sweetheart. I’ll come out there and find you.’ It was my brave, splendid Nénette giving full voice to her love. In the body of the court my friends of the underworld applauded. They knew perfectly well what to think about this killing, and this was their way of showing me that they were proud I had not given anything away or put the blame on anybody else.

Once we were back in the little room where we had been before the trial the gendarmes put the handcuffs on me, and one of them arranged a short chain, fixing my right wrist to his left. Not a word. I asked for a cigarette. The sergeant gave me one and lit it for me. Every time I took it out or put it back to my mouth the gendarme had to raise his arm or lower it to follow my movement.

I stood there until I had smoked about three-quarters of the cigarette. No one uttered a sound. I was the one who looked at the sergeant and said, ‘Let’s go.’

Down the stairs, surrounded by a dozen gendarmes, and I came to the inner yard of the law-courts. Our black maria was waiting for us there. It was not the sort with compartments: we sat on benches, about ten of us. The sergeant said, ‘Conciergerie.’

Conciergerie

When we reached this last of Marie-Antoinette’s palaces, the gendarmes handed me over to the head warder, who signed a paper, their receipt. They went off without saying anything, but before they left the sergeant shook my two handcuffed hands. Surprise!

The head warder said to me, ‘What did they give you?’

‘Life.’

‘It’s not true?’ He looked at the gendarmes and saw that it was true. This fifty-year-old warder had seen plenty and he knew all about my business: he had the decency to say this to me – ‘The bastards! They must be out of their minds!’

Gently he took off my handcuffs, and he was good-hearted enough to take me to the padded cell himself, one of those kept specially for men condemned to death, for lunatics, very dangerous prisoners and those who have been given penal servitude.

‘Keep your heart up, Papillon,’ he said, closing the door on me. ‘We’ll send you some of your things and the food from your other cell. Cheer up!’

‘Thanks, chief. My heart’s all right, believe me; I hope their penal bleeding servitude will choke them.’

A few minutes later there was a scratching outside the door. ‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ said a voice. ‘It’s only me putting a card on the door.’

‘Why? What’s it say?’

‘Penal servitude for life. To be watched closely.’

They’re crazy, I thought: do they really suppose that this ton of bricks falling on my head is going to worry me to the point of committing suicide? I am brave and I always shall be brave. I’ll fight everyone and everything. I’ll start right away, tomorrow.

As I drank my coffee the next day I wondered whether I should appeal. What was the point? Should I have any better luck coming up before another court? And how much time would it waste? A year: maybe eighteen months. And all for what – getting twenty years instead of life?

As I had thoroughly made up my mind to escape, the number of years did not count: I remembered what a sentenced prisoner had said to an assize judge. ‘Monsieur, how many years does penal servitude for life last in France?’

I paced up and down my cell. I had sent one wire to comfort my wife and another to a sister who, alone against the world, had done her best to defend her brother. It was over: the curtain had fallen. My people must suffer more than me, and far away in the country my poor father would find it very hard to bear so heavy a cross.

Suddenly my breath stopped: but I was innocent! I was indeed; but for whom? Yes, who was I innocent for? I said to myself, above all don’t you ever arse about telling people you’re innocent: you’ll only get laughed at. Getting life on account of a ponce and then saying it was somebody else that took him apart would be too bleeding comic. Just you keep your trap shut.

All the time I had been inside waiting for trial, both at the Santé and the Conciergerie, it had never occurred to me that I could possibly get a sentence like this, so I had never really thought about what ‘going down the drain’ might be like.

All right. The first thing to do was to get in touch with men who had already been sentenced, men who might later be companions in a break. I picked upon Dega, a guy from Marseilles. I’d certainly see him at the barber’s. He went there every day to get a shave. I asked to go too. Sure enough, when I came in I found him standing there with his nose to the wall. I saw him just as he was making another man move round him so as to have longer to wait for his turn. I got in right next to him, shoving someone else aside. Quickly I whispered, ‘You OK, Dega?’

‘OK, Papi. I got fifteen years. What about you? They say you really copped it.’

‘Yes: I got life.’

‘You’ll appeal?’

‘No. The thing to do is to eat well and to keep fit. Keep your strength up. Dega: we’ll certainly need good muscles. Are you loaded?’

‘Yes. I’ve got ten bags1 in pounds sterling. And you?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s a tip: get loaded quick. Your counsel was Hubert, wasn’t he? He’s a square and he’d never bring you in your charger. Send your wife with it, well filled, to Dante’s. Tell her to give it to Dominique le Riche and I guarantee it’ll reach you.’

‘Ssh. The screw’s watching us.’

‘So we’re having a break for gossip, are we?’ asked the screw.

‘Oh, nothing serious,’ said Dega. ‘He’s telling me he’s sick.’

‘What’s the matter with him? Assizes colic?’ And the fat-arsed screw choked with laughter.

That was life all right. I was on the way down the drain already. A place where you howl with laughter, making cracks about a boy of twenty-five who has been sentenced for the whole of the rest of his life.

I got the charger. It was a beautifully polished aluminium tube that unscrewed exactly in the middle. It had a male half and a female half. There was 5,600 francs in new notes inside. When it was passed to me I kissed it: yes, I kissed this three-and-a-half-inch thumb-thick tube before shoving it into my anus. I drew a deep breath so that it should get right up to my colon. It was my safe-deposit. They could strip me, make me open my legs, make me cough and bend double, but they could never find out whether I had anything. It went up very high into my big intestine. It was part of me. This was life and freedom that I was carrying inside me – the path to revenge. For I was thoroughly determined to have my revenge. Indeed, revenge was all I thought of.

It was dark outside. I was alone in the cell. A strong ceiling light let the screw see me through the little hole in the door. It dazzled me, this light. I laid my folded handkerchief over my eyes, for it really hurt. I was lying on a mattress on an iron bed – no pillow – and all the details of that horrible trial passed through my mind.

Now at this point perhaps I have to be a little tedious, but in order to make the rest of this long tale understandable and in order to thoroughly explain what kept me going in my struggle I must tell everything that came into my mind at that point, everything I really saw with my mind’s eye during those first days when I was a man who had been buried alive.

How was I going to set about things once I had escaped? Because now that I possessed my charger I hadn’t a second’s doubt that I was going to escape. In the first place I should get back to Paris as fast as possible. The first one to kill would be Polein, the false witness. Then the two cops in charge of the case. But just two cops was not enough: I ought to kill the lot. All the cops. Or at least as many as possible. Ah, I had the right idea. Once out, I would get back to Paris, I’d stuff a trunk with explosive. As much as it would hold. Ten, twenty, maybe forty pounds: I wasn’t sure quite how much. And I began working out what it would take to kill a great many people.

Dynamite? No, cheddite was better. And why not nitroglycerine? Right, I’d get advice from the people inside who knew more about it than me. But the cops could really rely upon me to provide what was coming to them, and no short measure, either.

I still had my eyes closed, with the handkerchief keeping them tight shut. Very clearly I could see the trunk, apparently innocent but really crammed with explosives, and the exactly set alarm-clock that would fire the detonator. Take care: it had to go off at ten in the morning in the assembly room of the Police Judiciaire2 on the first floor of 36, quai des Orfèvres. At that moment there would be at least a hundred and fifty cops gathered to hear the report and to get their orders. How many steps to go up? I mustn’t get it wrong.

I should have to work out the exact time it would take for the trunk to get up from the street to the place where it was to explode – work it out to the second. And who was going to carry it? OK: I’d get it in by bluff. I’d take a cab to the door of the Police Judiciaire and in a commanding voice I’d say to the two slops on guard, ‘Take this trunk up to the assembly room for me: I’ll follow. Tell Commissaire Dupont that it’s from Inspecteur chef Dubois, and that I’ll be there right away.’

But would they obey? What if I chanced upon the only two intelligent types among all those idiots? In that case it was no go. I’d have to find something else. Again and again I racked my brains. Deep inside I had no doubt that I should succeed in finding some hundred per cent certain way of doing it.

I got up for a drink of water. All that thinking had given me a headache. I lay down again without the cloth over my eyes: slowly the minutes dropped by. That light, dear God above, that light! I wetted the handkerchief and put it on again. The cold water felt good, and being heavier now the handkerchief fitted better over my eyelids. I would always do it that way from now on.

Those long hours during which I worked out my future revenge were so vivid that I could see myself carrying it out exactly as though the thing was actually being done. All through those nights and even during part of every day, there I was, moving about Paris, as though my escape was something that had already happened. I was dead certain that I should escape and that I should get back to Paris. And of course the first thing to do was to square the account with Polein: and after him, the cops. And what about the members of the jury? Were those bastards to go on living in peace? The poor silly bastards must have gone home very pleased with themselves for having carried out their duty with a capital D. Stuffed with their own importance, they would lord it over their neighbours and their drabble-tailed wives, who would have kept supper back for them.

OK. What was I to do about the jurymen? Nothing. They were poor dreary half-wits. They were in no way fitted to be judges. If one of them was a retired gendarme or a customs-man, he would react like a gendarme or a customs-man. And if he was a milkman, then he’d act like any other dim-wit pedlar. They had gone right along with the public prosecutor and he had had no sort of difficulty in bowling them over. They weren’t really answerable. So that was settled: I’d do them no harm whatsoever.

As I write these thoughts that came to me so vividly all those years ago and that now come crowding back with such terrible clarity, I remember how intensely total silence and complete solitariness can stimulate an imaginary life, when it is inflicted upon a young man shut up in a cell – how it can stimulate the imagination before the whole thing turns to madness. So intense and vivid a life that a man literally divides himself into two people. He takes wing and he quite genuinely wanders wherever he feels inclined to go. His home, his father, mother, family, his childhood – all the various stages of his life. And then even more, there are all those castles in Spain that appear in his fertile mind with such an unbelievable vividness that he really comes to believe that he is living through everything that he dreams.

Thirty-six years have passed, and yet recording everything that came into my head at that moment of my life does not need the slightest effort.

No: I should do the members of the jury no harm: my pen races along. But what about the prosecuting counsel? I must not miss him, not at any cost. In any case, I had a ready-made recipe for him, straight out of AlexAndré Dumas. Just like in The Count of Monte Cristo, and the guy they shoved into the cellar and let die of hunger.

As for that lawyer, yes, he was answerable all right. That red-robed vulture – there was everything in favour of putting him to death in the most hideous manner possible. Yes, that was what I should do: after Polein and the cops, I should devote my whole time to dealing with this creep. I’d rent a villa. It’d have to have a really deep cellar with thick walls and a very solid door. If the door wasn’t thick enough I should sound-proof it myself with a mattress and tow. Once I had the villa I’d work out his movements and then kidnap him. The rings would be all ready in the wall, so I’d chain him up straight away. And then which of us was going to have fun?

I had him directly opposite me: under my closed eyelids I could see him with extraordinary exactness. Yes, I looked at him just as he had looked at me in court. The scene was so clear and distinct that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face; for I was very close, face to face, almost touching him. His hawk’s eyes were dazzled and terrified by the beam of a very powerful headlight I had focused on him. Great drops of sweat ran down his red, swollen face. I could hear my questions and I listened to his replies. I experienced that moment very vividly.

‘Do you recognize me, you sod? I’m Papillon. Papillon, the guy you so cheerfully sent down the line for life. You sweated over your books for years and years so as to be a highly educated man; you spent your nights doing Roman law and all that jazz; you learnt Latin and Greek and you sacrificed your youth so as to become a great speaker. Do you think it was worth it? Where did it get you, you silly bastard? What did it help you do? To work out new, decent laws for the community? To persuade the people that peace is the finest thing on earth? To preach the philosophy of some terrific religion? Or even to use your influence, your superior college education, to persuade others to be better people or at least stop being wicked? Tell me, have you used your knowledge to pull men out of the water or to drown them? You’ve never helped a soul: you’ve only had one single motive – ambition! Up, up. Up the steps of your lousy career. The penal settlements’ best provider, the unlimited supplier of the executioner and the guillotine – that’s your glory. If Deibler3 had any sense of gratitude he’d send you a case of the best champagne every New Year. Isn’t it thanks to you, you bleeding son of a bitch, that he’s been able to lop off five or six more heads in the past twelve months? Anyhow, now I’m the one that’s got you, chained good and hard to this wall. I can just see the way you grinned, yes, I can see your triumphant look when they read out my sentence after your speech for the prosecution. It seems only yesterday, and yet it was years ago. How many? Ten years? Twenty?’

But what was happening to me? Why ten years? Why twenty? Get a hold on yourself, Papillon; you’re young, you’re strong, and you’ve got five thousand six hundred francs in your gut. Two years, yes. I’d do two years out of my life sentence, and no more: I swore that to myself.

Snap out of it, Papillon, you’re going crazy. The silence and this cell are driving you out of your mind. I’ve got no cigarettes. Finished the last yesterday. I’ll start walking. After all, I don’t have to have my eyes closed or my handkerchief over them to see what goes on. That’s it; I’m on my feet. The cell’s four yards long from the door to the wall – this is to say five short paces. I began walking, my hands behind my back. And I went on again, ‘All right. As I was saying, I can see your triumphant look quite distinctly. Well, I’m going to change it for you: into something quite different. In one way it’s easier for you than it was for me. I couldn’t shout out, but you can. Shout just as much as you like; shout as loud as you like. What am I going to do to you? Dumas’ recipe? Let you die of hunger, you sod? No: that’s not enough. To start with I’ll just put out your eyes. Eh? You still look triumphant, do you? You think that if I put your eyes out at least you’ll have the advantage of not seeing me any longer, and that I’ll be deprived of the pleasure of seeing the terror in them. Yes, you’re right: I mustn’t put them out. At least not right away. That’ll be for later. I’ll cut your tongue out, though, that terrible cutting tongue of yours, sharp as a knife; no, sharper – as sharp as a razor. The tongue that you prostituted to your splendid career. The same tongue that says pretty things to your wife, your kids and your girl-friend. Girl-friend? Boy-friend, more likely. Much more likely. You couldn’t be anything but a passive, flabby pouffe. That’s right: I must begin by doing away with your tongue, because next to your brain that’s what does the damage. You see it very well, you know: so well you could persuade the jury to answer yes to the questions put to them. So well that you could make the cops look like they were straight and devoted to their duty: so well that that witness’s cock and balls seemed to hold water. So well that those twelve bastards thought I was the most dangerous man in Paris. If you hadn’t possessed this false, skilful, persuasive tongue, so practised at distorting people and facts and things, I should still be sitting there on the terrace of the Grand Cafe in the Place Blanche, and I’d never have had to stir. So we’re all agreed, then, that I’m going to rip this tongue of yours right out. But what’ll I do it with?’

I paced on and on and on. My head was spinning, but there I was, still face to face with him, when suddenly the electricity went out and a very faint ray of daylight made its way into the cell through the boarded window.

What? Morning already? Had I spent the whole night with my revenge? What splendid hours they had been! How that long, long night had flown by!

Sitting on my bed, I listened. Nothing. The most total silence. Now and then a little click at my door. It was the warder, wearing slippers so as to make no sound, opening the little metal flap and putting his eye to the peep-hole that let him see me without my being able to see him.

The machinery that the Republic of France had thought up was now entering its second phase. It was working splendidly: in its first run it had wiped out a man that might be a nuisance to it. But that was not enough. The man was not to die too quickly: he mustn’t manage to get out of it by way of suicide. He was wanted. Where would the prison service be if there weren’t any prisoners? In the shit. So he was to be watched. He had to go off alive to the penal settlements, where he would provide a living for still more state employees. I heard the click again, and it made me smile.

Don’t you worry, you sod: I shan’t escape. At least not the way you’re afraid of – not by suicide. There’s only one thing I want, and that’s to keep alive and as fit as possible and to leave as soon as I can for that French Guiana where you’re sending me, bloody fools that you are: thank God.

This old warder with his perpetual clicking was a fairy godmother in comparison with the screws over there: they were no choir-boys, not by any means. I’d always known that; for when Napoleon set up the penal settlements and they said to him. ‘Who are you going to have to look after these hard cases?’ he answered, ‘Harder cases still.’ Afterwards I found that the inventor of the penal settlements had not lied.

Clang clang: an eight-inch-square hole opened in the middle of my door. They passed me in coffee and a pound and a half of bread. Now I was sentenced I was no longer allowed to have things sent in from the restaurant, but if I could pay I could still buy cigarettes and a certain amount of food from the little canteen. That would last a few days more, then after that nothing. The Conciergerie was the stage just before penal internment. I smoked a Lucky Strike, enjoying it enormously: six francs sixty a packet they cost. I bought two. I was spending my official prison money because soon they would be confiscating it for the costs of the trial.

Dega sent a little note in my bread to tell me to go to the de-lousing centre. ‘There are three lice in the matchbox.’ I took out the matches and I found his fine healthy cooties. I knew what it meant. I showed them to the warder so that the next day he should send me and all my things, including the mattress, to a steam-room where all the parasites would be killed – except us, of course. And there the next day I met Dega. No warder in the steam-room. We were alone.

‘You’re a good guy, Dega. Thanks to you I’ve got my charger.’

‘It doesn’t bother you?’

‘No.’

‘Every time you go to the latrine, wash it well before you put it back.’

‘Yes. I think it’s completely water-tight. The folded notes are perfect, though I’ve had it in this last week.’

‘That means it’s all right, then.’

‘What do you think you’ll do, Dega?’

‘I’m going to pretend to be mad. I don’t want to go to Guiana. I’ll do maybe eight or ten years here in France. I’ve got contacts and I can get five years remission at least.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Forty-two.’

‘Then you’re out of your mind! If you do ten out of your fifteen you’ll come out an old man. Are you scared of penal?’

‘Yes. I’m not ashamed of saying it to you, Papillon, but I’m scared. It’s terrible in Guiana. Eighty per cent mortality every year. One convoy takes the place of the last, and each convoy has between eighteen hundred and two thousand men. If you don’t get leprosy you get yellow fever or one of those kinds of dysentery there’s no recovering from, or else consumption or malaria. And if you escape all that then it’s very likely you’ll get murdered for your charger, or else you’ll die trying to make a break. Believe me, Papillon, I’m not trying to discourage you; but I’ve known a good many lags who’ve come back to France after doing short stretches – five to seven years – and I know what I’m talking about. They are absolute complete bleeding wrecks. They spend nine months of the year in hospital; and they say that making a break is nothing like what people think – not a piece of cake at all.’

‘I believe you, Dega. But I believe in myself, too. I won’t waste much time there. That’s something you can be sure of. I’m a sailor and I understand the sea, and you can trust me when I say I shall make a break very soon. And what about you? Can you really see yourself doing ten years hard? Even if they do give you five off, which is not at all sure, do you really think you could do it without being driven crazy by the solitary? Take me now, all alone in that cell with no books, no going out, no being able to talk to anyone twenty-four hours every god-damned day – it’s not sixty minutes you have to count in each hour but six hundred: and even then you’re far short of the truth.’

‘Maybe. But you’re young and I’m forty-two.’

‘Listen, Dega, tell me straight: what is it you’re scared of most? The other lags, isn’t it?’

‘To tell you straight, Papi, yes it is. Everyone knows I’m a millionaire, and there’s no distance between that and cutting my throat because they think I’m carrying fifty or a hundred thousand on me.’

‘Listen, do you want us to make a pact? You promise me not to go crazy and I’ll promise to keep right next to you all the time. Each can support the other. I’m strong and I move quick: I learnt how to fight when I was a kid and I’m terrific with a knife. So as far as the other lags are concerned you can rest easy: we’ll be respected, and more than that we’ll be feared. As for the break, we don’t need anyone else. You’ve got cash, I’ve got cash: I know how to use a compass and I can sail a boat. What more do you want?’

He looked at me hard, right in the eye … We embraced one another. The pact was signed.

A few moments later the door opened. He went off with his pack in one direction and I in the other. We were not very far apart and we saw one another from time to time at the barber’s or the doctor’s or in chapel on Sundays.

Dega had been sent down for the business of the phony National Defence bonds. A bright forger had produced them in a very unusual way: he bleached the five hundred franc bonds and overprinted them with the ten thousand franc text, absolutely perfectly. As the paper was the same, banks and businessmen accepted them just like that. It had been going on for years and the government’s financial section was all at sea until the day they picked up a character named Brioulet – caught him red-handed.

Louis Dega was sitting there calmly, keeping an eye on his bar in Marseilles, where the pick of the southern underworld came every night and where the really hard guys from all over the world met one another – an international rendezvous. That was 1929 and he was a millionaire. Then one night a young, pretty, well-dressed woman turned up. She asked for Monsieur Louis Dega.

‘That’s me, Madame. What can I do for you? Come into the next room.’

‘Look, I’m Brioulet’s wife. He’s in Paris in prison for passing forged bonds. I saw him in the visiting-room at the Santé: he gave me the address of this bar and told me to come and ask you for twenty thousand francs to pay the lawyer.’

It was at this point, faced with the danger of a woman who knew his part in the business, that Dega, one of the most esteemed crooks in France, made the one remark he never should have made. ‘Listen, Madame, I don’t know your husband from Adam, and if you need money, go on the streets. You’re young and pretty and you’ll make more than you need.’ Furious, the poor woman ran out in tears. She told her husband. Brioulet was mad and the next day he told the investigating magistrate everything he knew, directly accusing Dega of being the man who produced the forged bonds. A team of the most intelligent detectives in the country got on to Dega’s trail. One month later Dega, the forger, the engraver and eleven accomplices were all arrested at the same moment in different places and put behind bars. They came up at the Seine Assizes and the trial lasted fourteen days. Each prisoner was defended by a famous lawyer. Brioulet would never take back a single word. And the result was that for a piddling twenty thousand francs and a damn-fool crack the biggest crook in France got fifteen years hard labour. There he was, ten years older than his age, and completely ruined. And this was the man I had just signed a treaty with – a life and death pact.

Maître Raymond Hubert came to see me. He wasn’t very pleased with himself. I never uttered a word of blame.

One, two, three, four, five, about turn … One, two, three, four, five, about turn. It was a good many hours now that I had been walking up and down between the door and the window of my cell. I smoked: I felt I was well in control, steady-handed and able to cope with anything at all. I promised myself not to think about revenge for the time being. Let’s leave the prosecuting counsel just there where I left him, chained to the rings in the wall, opposite me, without yet making up my mind exactly how I’d do him in.

Suddenly a shriek, a desperate, high-pitched, hideously dying shriek made its way through the door of my cell. What was it? It was like the sound of a man under torture. But this was not the Police Judiciaire. No way of telling what was going on. They turned me right up, those shrieks in the night. And what strength they must have had, to pierce through that padded door. Maybe it was a lunatic. It’s so easy to go mad in these cells where nothing ever gets through to you. I talked aloud there all by myself: I said to myself what the hell’s it got to do with you? Keep your mind on yourself, nothing but yourself and your new side-kick Dega. I bent down, straightened up and hit myself hard on the chest. It really hurt: so everything was all right – the muscles of my arms were working perfectly. And what about your legs, man? You can congratulate them, because you’ve been walking more than sixteen hours now and you’re not even beginning to feel tired.

The Chinese discovered the drop of water that falls on your head. The French discovered silence. They do away with everything that might occupy your mind. No books, no paper, no pencil: the heavily-barred window entirely boarded up: only a very little light filtering through a few small holes.

That piercing shriek had really shaken me, and I went up and down like an animal in a cage, I had the dreadful feeling that I had been left there, abandoned by everybody, and that I was literally buried alive. I was alone, absolutely alone: the only thing that could ever get through to me was a shriek.

The door opened. An old priest appeared. Suddenly you’re not alone: there’s a priest there, standing in front of you.

‘Good evening, my son. Forgive me for not having come before, but I was on holiday. How are you?’ And the good old curé walked calmly into the cell and sat right down on my pad. ‘Where do you come from?’

‘The Ardèche.’

‘And your people?’

‘Mum died when I was eleven. Dad was very good to me.’

‘What did he do?’

‘School-teacher.’

‘Is he alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you speak of him in the past if he is still alive?’

‘Because although he’s alive all right, I’m dead.’

‘Oh, don’t say that! What did you do?’

In a flash I thought how square it would sound to say I was innocent: I replied, ‘The police say I killed a man; and if they say it, it must be true.’

‘Was it a tradesman?’

‘No. A ponce.’

‘And they’ve sentenced you to hard labour for life for something that happened in the underworld? I don’t understand. Was it murder?’

‘No. Manslaughter.’

‘My poor boy, it’s unbelievable. What can I do for you? Would you like to pray with me?’

‘I never had any religious instruction. I don’t know how to pray.’

‘That doesn’t matter, my son: I’ll pray for you. God loves all His children, whether they are christened or not. Repeat each word as I say it, won’t you?’ His eyes were so gentle, and such kindness beamed from his round face that I was ashamed to refuse; and as he had gone down on his knees I did the same. ‘Our Father which art in heaven …’ Tears came into my eyes: the dear priest saw them and with his plump finger he gathered a big drop as it ran down my cheek. He put it to his mouth and drank it. ‘My son,’ he said, ‘these tears are the greatest reward God could ever have sent me today, and it comes to me through you. Thank you.’ And as he got up he kissed me on the forehead.

We sat there, side by side on the bed again. ‘How long is it since you wept?’

‘Fourteen years.’

‘Why fourteen years ago?’

‘It was the day Mum died.’

He took my hand in his and said, ‘Forgive those who have made you suffer so.’

I snatched it away and sprang into the middle of my cell – an instinctive reaction. ‘Not on your life! I’ll never forgive them. And I’ll tell you something, Father. There’s not a day, not a night, not an hour or minute when I’m not busy working out how I’ll kill the guys that sent me here – how, when and what with.’

‘You say that, my son, and you believe it. You’re young, very young. As you grow older you’ll give up the thought of punishment and revenge.’ Thirty-four years have passed now, and I am of his opinion. ‘What can I do for you?’ asked the priest again.

‘A crime, Father.’

‘What crime?’

‘Going to cell 37 and telling Dega to get his lawyer to ask for him to be sent to the central prison at Caen – tell him I’ve done the same today. We have to get out of the Conciergerie quick and leave for one of the centrals where they make up the Guiana convoys. Because if you miss the first boat you have to wait another two years in solitary before there’s another. And when you’ve seen him, Father, will you come back here?’

‘What reason could I give?’

‘You could say that you forgot your breviary. I’ll be waiting for the answer.’

‘And why are you in such a hurry to go off to such a hideous place as the penal settlement?’

I looked at him hard, this great-hearted salesman of the good word, and I was certain he would not betray me. ‘So as to escape all the sooner, Father.’

‘God will help you, my boy, I am sure of it; and I feel that you will remake your life. I can see in your eyes that you are a decent fellow and that your heart is in the right place. I’ll go to cell 37 for you. You can expect an answer.’

He was back very soon. Dega agreed. The curé left me his breviary until the next day.

What a ray of sunlight that was! Thanks to that dear good man my cell was filled with it – all lit up. If God exists why does He allow such different sorts of human being on earth? Creatures like the prosecuting counsel, the police, Polein – and then this chaplain, the chaplain of the Conciergerie?

That truly good man’s visit set me up, healed me: and it was useful, too. Our requests went through quickly and a week later there we were, seven of us lined up in the corridor of the Conciergerie at four in the morning. All the screws were there too, a full parade.

‘Strip!’ Everybody slowly took off his clothes. It was cold and I had goose-pimples.

‘Leave your things in front of you. About turn. One pace backwards.’ And there in front of each of us was a heap of clothes.

‘Dress yourselves.’ The good linen shirt I had been wearing a few moments earlier was replaced by a rough undyed canvas job and my lovely suit by a coarse jacket and trousers. No more shoes: instead of them I put my feet into a pair of wooden sabots. Up until then I’d looked like any other ordinary type. I glanced at the other six – Jesus, what a shock! No individuality left at all: they had turned us into convicts in two minutes.

‘By the right, dress. Forward march!’ With a escort of twenty warders we reached the courtyard and there, one after another, each man was shoved into a narrow cupboard in the cellular van. All aboard for Beaulieu – Beaulieu being the name of the prison at Caen,

Caen Prison

The moment we got there we were taken into the governor’s office. He was sitting in pomp behind an Empire desk on a dais some three feet high.

‘Shun! The governor is going to speak to you.’

‘Prisoners, you are here in transit until you can be sent off to the penal settlement. This is not an ordinary prison. Compulsory silence all the time: no visits: no letters from anyone. You obey or you are broken. There are two doors you can go out by. One leads to the penal settlement, if you behave well. The other to the graveyard. And just let me tell you about bad behaviour: the slightest error will get you sixty days in the punishment-cell on bread and water. No one has yet survived two consecutive sentences to the black-hole. You get my meaning?’ He turned to Pierrot le Fou, who had been extradited from Spain. ‘What was your calling in civil life?’

‘Bullfighter, Monsieur le Directeur.’

The reply infuriated the governor and he bawled out ‘Take him away! Double-quick time!’ Before you could blink, the bullfighter had been knocked down, clubbed by four or five screws and hurried away from us. He could be heard shouting ‘You bastards – five against one. With clubs too, you cowardly shits!’ Then an ah like an animal given its death-wound: and nothing more. Only the sound of something being dragged along the concrete floor.

If we did not get the governor’s meaning after that performance we should never get it at all. Dega was next to me. He moved one finger, just one, and touched my trousers. I understood his signal: ‘Look out for yourself if you want to reach Guiana alive.’ Ten minutes later each one of us was in a cell in the punishment block – each one of us except for Pierrot le Fou, who had been taken down below ground-level to a vile black-hole.

As luck would have it Dega was in the next cell to mine. Before this we had been shown to a kind of red-headed, one-eyed ogre, well over six feet tall, with a brand-new bull’s pizzle in his right hand. This was the provost, a prisoner who acted as torturer under the orders of the screws. He was the terror of the convicts. With him at hand the warders could beat and flog the prisoners not only without tiring themselves out but also without getting blamed by the authorities in case anyone died of it.

Later, when I was doing a short spell in the hospital, I learnt the story of this human brute. The governor really ought to have been congratulated on choosing his executioner so well. This guy was a quarryman by trade. He lived in a little town up in Flanders, and one day he made up his mind to do away with himself and to kill his wife at the same time. He used a fair-sized stick of dynamite for the job. He lay down next to his wife, who was in their bedroom on the second floor of a six-storey building. She was asleep. He lit a cigarette and used it to light the fuse, holding the stick in his left hand between his own head and his wife’s. God-almighty bang. Result: wife had to be scooped up with a spoon – she was literally mincemeat. Part of the house collapsed, killing three children and a seventy-year-old woman. And everybody else in it more or less dangerously hurt. As for this Tribouillard, the guy in question, he lost some of his left hand (only his little finger and half his thumb remaining) and his left eye and ear. His head was bashed badly enough to need trepanning. After his conviction they made him provost in the punishment block of the central prison. This half-maniac had complete power over the wretched prisoners who landed up there.

One, two, three, four, five, about turn … one, two, three, four, five, about turn … the unending to-and-fro between the door of the cell and the wall had begun.

You were not allowed to lie down during the daytime. At five in the morning everyone was woken by a piercing blast on a whistle. You had to get up, make your bed, wash, and then either walk about or sit on a stool clamped to the wall. You were not allowed to lie down all day long. And to put the last touch to the penal system the bed was made to fold up against the wall and hook there. That way the prisoner was unable to stretch himself out and he could be watched all the easier.

One, two, three, four, five … fourteen hours of pacing. To get into the way of this unceasing, mechanical rhythm you have to learn to keep your head down, your hands behind your back, and to walk neither too fast nor too slow, paces all the same length, turning automatically at each end of the cell, left foot one end, right the other.

One, two, three, four, five … The cells were better lit than at the Conciergerie and noises from outside could be heard – some noises from the punishment block and some that reached us from the countryside. At night you could make out the whistling or the singing as the farm-workers went home, happy after their cider.

I had my Christmas present. There was a crack in the plants blocking the window and through it I saw the snowy fields and a few tall black trees with the full moon lighting them up. Anyone would have said it was one of those cards you send at Christmas. The trees had been shaken by the wind and they had got rid of their covering of snow, so you could distinguish them quite clearly. They stood out as great dark patches against all the rest.

It was Christmas for everybody: it was even Christmas in one part of the prison. The authorities had made an effort for the convicts in transit – we were allowed to buy two bars of chocolate. I really mean two bars and not two slabs. My 1931 Christmas dinner consisted of these two bits of Aiguebelle chocolate.

One, two, three, four, five … The Law’s repression had turned me into a pendulum: my whole world was this going to and fro in a cell. It had been scientifically worked out. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was allowed to remain in the cell. Above all the prisoner must never be allowed to turn his mind to other things. If I were caught looking through that crack in the window planks I should be severely punished. And after all, weren’t they right, since as far as they were concerned I was merely a living corpse? What right had I to delight in the landscape?

There was a butterfly, a pale blue butterfly with a little black stripe, flying close to the window, and a bee humming not far from the butterfly. What on earth were they looking for in this place? They seemed to have gone out of their wits at the sight of the winter sun: unless maybe they were cold and wanted to get into the prison. A butterfly in winter is something that has come to life again. How come it wasn’t dead? And how come that bee had left its hive? What a nerve – if only they had known it – to come here! Fortunately the provost had no wings, or they wouldn’t be alive for long.

This Tribouillard was a bleeding sadist and I had a strong feeling there would be trouble with him. I wasn’t wrong either, more’s the pity. The day after those lovely insects came to see me I reported sick. I couldn’t bear it any more – the loneliness was smothering me and I had to see a face and hear a voice, even an unpleasant one. For it would still be a voice; and something I just had to hear.

Stark naked in the icy corridor I stood there facing the wall, my nose three inches from it: I was the last but one in a line of eight, and I was waiting my turn to go in front of the doctor. I had wanted to see people: and I succeeded all right! The provost caught us just as I was whispering a few words to Julot, the one they called the hammer-man. The red-headed maniac’s reaction was appalling. He half knocked me out with a punch on the back of my head, and as I’d not seen the blow coming my nose went smash against the wall. The blood spurted out, and as I got up – for I had fallen – I shook myself, trying to grasp what had happened. I made a faint movement of protest. That was the very thing the huge brute had been waiting for and with a kick in the belly he flattened me again and started flogging me with his bull’s pizzle. Julot couldn’t bear this. He jumped on him and a frightful dog-fight began: as Julot was getting the worst of it the warders stood calmly looking on. I got up. No one took any notice of me. I glanced round to see whether I could see anything to use as a weapon. Suddenly I saw the doctor leaning over his armchair in his surgery, trying to make out what was going on in the corridor: and at the same moment I caught sight of a saucepan-lid rising under the push of the steam. The big enamel saucepan was sitting on a stove that warmed the doctor’s room. The steam was meant to purify the air, no doubt.

Then, moving very fast, I caught the pot by the handles – it burnt but I didn’t drop it – and in one swing I flung all the boiling water into the provost’s face. He was so busy with Julot he never saw me coming. The big bastard uttered a hideous, tearing shriek. He had really copped it. There he was writhing on the ground, trying to tear off his three woollen vests, one after the other. When at last he got to the third his skin came off with it. It was a narrow-necked vest and as he ripped it off the skin of his chest, part of the skin of his neck and all on his cheek came too, sticking to the wool. His one eye had been scalded as well, and he was blind. At last he got up, hideous, oozing with blood, flayed; and Julot took advantage of it to give him a terrible kick right in the balls. The huge brute went down, vomiting and frothing at the mouth. He was finished. As for us, we lost nothing by waiting for what was coming to us. The two warders who had been watching this performance hadn’t the guts to tackle us. They sounded the alarm for reinforcements. They came in from all sides and the truncheon-blows rained down on us thick as hail. I had the luck to be knocked out very early, which prevented me from feeling much.

I woke up two storeys lower down, stark naked, in a flooded black-hole. Slowly I came to. I ran my hand all over my aching body. There were at least fourteen or fifteen lumps on my head. What was the time? I couldn’t tell. Down here there was neither night nor day: no light of any kind. I heard a knocking on the wall, a knocking that came from a great way off.

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. This knocking was how we communicated with each other. I had to knock twice if I wanted to answer. Knock: but what with? In the darkness I couldn’t make out anything I could use. Fists were no good – their blows were not sharp or distinct enough. I moved over to where I imagined the door was, for it was a little less dark over there. I came up hard against bars I had not seen. Reaching out in the darkness I came to understand that the cell was closed by a door about a yard from me, and that these bars I was touching prevented me from getting to it. This way, when anyone wants to go into a dangerous prisoner’s cell he is in no danger of being touched, because the prisoner is in a cage. You can talk to him, soak him, throw his food in and insult him without the least risk. But there’s this advantage – he can’t be hit without danger, because in order to hit him you have to open the bars.

From time to time the knocking was repeated. Who could it be that was calling me? The guy deserved to be answered, because he was running a diabolical risk if he was caught. As I moved about I very nearly came down on my face. I had trodden on something hard and round. I felt for it: a wooden spoon. I grabbed it and got ready to answer. I waited there, with my ear hard up against the wall. Thump, thump, thump, thump, pause: thump, thump. Thump-thump, I replied. These two knocks meant to the man the other end, Go ahead, I’m taking the call. The knocking began again: thump, thump, thump … The alphabet ran by quickly – a b c d e f g h i j k I m n o p: stop. He was stopping at the letter p. I struck one hard blow. Thump. So he knew I had got the letter. Then came an a, a p, an i, and so on. He was saying, ‘Papi, you OK? You got it bad. I have a broken arm.’ It was Julot.

We talked to one another in this way for more than two hours without worrying about being caught. We were absolutely delighted, exchanging our messages. I told him I had nothing broken, that my head was covered with lumps, but that I was not wounded anywhere.

He had seen me going down, dragged by one foot, and he told me that at each stair my head had banged on the step before. He had never lost consciousness. He thought that Tribouillard had been very seriously scalded and that with the help of the wool the burns had gone deep – he was not going to get over it in a hurry.

Three very fast, repeated knocks told me there was something up. I stopped. And indeed a few moments later the door opened. There was a shout, ‘Get to the back, you sod! Get to the back of your cell and stand to attention.’ It was the new provost speaking. ‘Batton’s my name, my real name. I’ve got the name of the job, you see.’ He lit up the black-hole and my naked body with a big ship’s lantern. ‘Here’s something to put on. Don’t you stir from back there. Here’s some bread and water.4 Don’t stuff it all down at one go: you won’t get anything more for another twenty-four hours.’

He shouted at me like a brute and then he raised the lantern to his face. I saw he was smiling, but not wickedly. He laid a finger on his lips and pointed at the things he had left. There must have been a warder in the passage, but he wanted to make me understand he was not an enemy.

True enough, inside the hunk of bread I found a big piece of boiled meat and in the pocket of the trousers – Christ, what wealth! – a packet of cigarettes and a dry lighter – a tinder lighter with a bit of tinderwick in it. Presents like this were worth millions here. Two shirts instead of one, and woollen drawers that came down to my ankles. I’ll never forget him, that Batton. He was rewarding me for having wiped out Tribouillard. Before the dust-up he had only been assistant-provost. Now, thanks to me, he had risen to be the great man himself. In a word, he owed his promotion to me and he was showing his gratitude. And because we were safe with Batton, Julot and I sent one another telegrams all day long. I learnt from him that our departure for the penal settlement was no great way off – three or four months.

Two days later we were brought out of the punishment cells and taken up to the governor’s office, two warders to each of us. There were three men sitting there opposite the door, behind a table. It was a kind of court. The governor acted as president, and the deputy-governor and chief warders as assessors.

‘Ah-ha, my young friends, so here you are! What have you got to say?’

Julot was very white and his eyes were swollen: he certainly had a temperature. His arm had been broken three days ago, and he must have been in shocking pain. Quietly he said, ‘My arm’s broken.’

‘You asked for it. That’ll teach you to fly at people. You’ll see the doctor when he comes. I hope it will be within a week. The waiting will be good for you, because the pain will perhaps be a lesson. But you don’t think I’m going to send for a doctor especially for a fellow like you? You can just wait until the prison doctor has time to come, and he will look after you. But nevertheless I sentence you both to the black-hole until further orders.’

Julot looked full at me, right in the eye. He seemed to be saying, ‘This well-dressed gent disposes of other people’s lives very easily.’

I turned towards the governor again and looked at him. He thought I meant to speak. He said, ‘And what about you? The sentence doesn’t seem to be to your liking? Have you anything to say against it?’

I said, ‘Absolutely nothing, Monsieur le Directeur. The only thing I feel is an urge to spit in your eye; but I don’t like to do so, in case it should dirty my spit.’

He was taken aback, he reddened and for a moment he couldn’t grasp what I’d said. But the chief warder grasped it all right. He roared at the screws, ‘Take him out and look after him properly. I want to see him here again in an hour’s time, begging pardon on his hands and knees. We’ll tame him! I’ll make him polish my boots with his tongue, soles and all. Don’t be lenient with him – he’s all yours.’

Two warders twisted my right arm, two others my left. I was flat on my face with my hands right up against my shoulder-blades. They put on handcuffs with a thumb-piece, fixing my left forefinger to the thumb of my right hand, and the top warder picked me up by the hair like an animal.

There’s no point telling you what they did to me. I’ll just say I had the handcuffs on behind my back for eleven days. I owed my life to Batton. Every day he tossed the regulation hunk of bread into my cell, but since I couldn’t use my hands it was impossible to eat it. Even when I had it wedged up against the bars I couldn’t manage to bite into the lump. But Batton also tossed in bits the size of a mouthful, and he tossed in enough to keep me alive. I heaped them up with my foot and flat on my belly I ate them like a dog. I chewed each bit very thoroughly, so as not to lose anything at all.

When they took the handcuffs off me on the twelfth day the steel had eaten in, and in some places the metal was covered with bruised flesh. The head warder got scared, particularly as I fainted away with the pain. After they had brought me round they took me to the hospital, where they cleaned me up with hydrogen peroxide. The attendant insisted on my being given an anti-tetanus shot. My arms had stiffened and could not go back to their natural position. It took more than half an hour of rubbing them with camphorated oil before I could bring them down to my sides.

I went back to the black-hole, and the chief warder, seeing the eleven hunks of bread, said, ‘You can have a proper banquet now! But it’s funny – you haven’t got all that thin after eleven days of starving.’

‘I drank plenty of water, chief.’

‘Ah, so that’s it. I get you. Well, now eat plenty to get your strength back.’ And he went away.

The poor bloody half-wit! He said that because he was sure I hadn’t eaten anything for eleven days and because if I stuffed myself all at once I should die of it. Not bleeding likely. Towards nightfall Batton sent me in some tobacco and cigarette-paper. I smoked and smoked, breathing out into the central-heating pipe – it never worked, of course, but at least it served that purpose.

Later I called up Julot. He too thought I had eaten nothing for eleven days and he advised me to go easy. I did not like to let him know the truth, because I was afraid of some bastard picking up the message. His arm was in plaster; he was in good form; he congratulated me on holding out. According to him the convoy was close at hand. The medical orderly had told him the shots the convicts were to be given before they left had already arrived. They usually came a month before the convoy left. Julot wasn’t very cautious, for he also asked me whether I had managed to keep my charger.

Yes, I had kept it all right, but I can’t describe what I had had to do not to lose it. There were some cruel wounds in my anus.

Three weeks later they took us out of the punishment cells. What was up? They gave us a marvellous shower with soap and hot water. I felt myself coming to life again. Julot was laughing like a child and Pierrot le Fou beamed all over himself with happiness.

Since we had come straight out of the black-hole we knew nothing about what was happening. The barber wouldn’t answer when I whispered, ‘What’s up?’ A wicked-looking character I didn’t know said, ‘I think we’re amnestied from the punishment cells. Maybe they’re scared of an inspector who’s coming by. The great thing is they have to show us alive.’ Each of us was taken to an ordinary cell. At noon, as I ate my first bowl of hot soup for forty-three days, I found a bit of wood. On it I read ‘Leave in a week’s time. Shots tomorrow.’

Who had sent it? I never knew. It must have been some convict who was decent enough to give us warning. He knew that if one of us knew it we all should. It was just chance that the message came to me. I called Julot right away and told him. ‘Pass it on,’ I said.

I heard telephoning all night long. As for me, once I’d sent it out I stopped. I was too comfortable in my bed. I didn’t want any sort of trouble. And the prospect of going back to the black-hole didn’t attract me at all. Today less than any other time.

1 10,000 francs

2 The branch of the police particularly concerned with crime.

3 The executioner in 1932.

4 1 lb. of bread and one-and-three-quarter pints of water.

Second Exercise-Book On the way to Guiana
Saint-Martin-de-Ré

That evening Batton sent me in three cigarettes and a piece of paper that read, ‘Papillon, I know you’ll remember me kindly when you go. I’m provost, but I try to hurt the prisoners as little as possible. I took the job because I’ve got nine children and I can’t wait for a pardon. I’m going to try to earn it without doing too much harm. Good-bye. Good luck. The convoy is for the day after tomorrow.’

And in fact the next day they assembled us in the corridor of the punishment-block in groups of thirty. Medical orderlies from Caen gave us shots against tropical diseases. Three shots for each man, and three and a half pints of milk. Dega was close to me: he looked thoughtful. We no longer paid any attention to the rules of silence for we knew they couldn’t put us in the punishment cell just after having our injections. We gossiped in an undertone right there in front of the screws, who dared not say anything because of the orderlies from the town.

Dega said to me, ‘Are they going to have enough cellular vans to take us all in one go?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It’s a good way off. Saint-Martin-de-Ré, and if they take sixty a day, it’ll last ten days, because we’re close on six hundred here alone.’

‘The great thing is to have the injections. That means you’re on the list and soon you’ll be in Guiana. Keep your chin up, Dega: the next stage is beginning now. Count on me, just as I count on you.’

He looked at me, his eyes shining with pleasure; he put his hand on my arm and once again he said, ‘Life or death, Papi.’

There was nothing really much to say about the convoy, except that each man very nearly stifled in his little cupboard in the cellular van. The warders wouldn’t let us have any air, not even by letting the doors stand just ajar. When we reached La Rochelle two of the people in our van were found dead, asphyxiated.

There were people standing around on the quay – for Saint-Martin-de-Re is an island and we had to take a boat to cross – and they saw those two poor unfortunate bastards being found. Not that they showed feelings of any sort for us, I may add. And since the gendarmes had to hand us over at the citadel, living or dead, they loaded the corpses on to the boat along with the rest of us.

It was not a long crossing, but it gave us a real breath of sea-air. I said to Dega, ‘It smells of a break.’ He smiled. And Julot, next to us, said, ‘Yes. It smells of a break. I’m on my way back to the place I escaped from five years ago. Like a silly bastard I let myself be picked up just as I was on the point of carving up the fence who’d done the Judas on me at the time of my little trouble ten years ago. Let’s try and stay together, because at Saint-Martin they put you ten to a cell in any old order, just as you come to hand.’

He’d got that one wrong, brother Julot. When we got there he and two others were called out and set apart from the rest. They were three men who had got away from the penal settlement: they had been retaken in France and now they were going back for the second time.

Grouped ten by ten in our cells, we began a life of waiting. We were allowed to talk and smoke, and we were very well fed. The only danger during this period was for your charger. You could never tell why, but suddenly you would be called up, stripped and very carefully searched. The whole of your body first, even the soles of your feet, and then all your clothes. ‘Get dressed again!’ And back you went to where you came from.

Cells: dining-hall: the courtyard where we spent hours and hours marching in single file. ‘Left, right! Left, right! Left, right!’ We marched in groups of five hundred convicts. A long, long crocodile; wooden shoes going clack-clack. Compulsory total silence. Then, ‘Fall out!’ Everyone would sit down on the ground, forming groups according to class or status. First came the men of the genuine underworld: with them it scarcely mattered where you came from, and there were Corsicans, men from Marseilles, Toulouse, Brittany, Paris and so on. There was even one from the Ardèche, and that was me. I must say this for the Ardèche – there were only two Ardèchois in the whole convoy of one thousand nine hundred men, a gamekeeper who had killed his wife, and me. Which proves that the Ardéchois are good guys. The other groups came together more or less anyhow, because more flats than sharps go to the penal settlements, more squares than wide boys. These days of waiting were called observation days. And it was true enough they observed us from every possible angle.

One afternoon I was sitting in the sun when a man came up to me. A little man, spectacled, thin. I tried to place him, but with our clothing all being the same it was very difficult.

‘You’re the one they call Papillon?’ He had a very strong Corsican accent.

‘That’s right. What do you want with me?’

‘Come to the latrine,’ he said. And he went off.

‘That guy,’ said Dega, ‘he’s some square from Corsica. A mountain bandit, for sure. What can he possibly want with you?’

‘I’m going to find out.’

I went towards the latrines in the middle of the courtyard and when I got there I pretended to piss. The man stood next to me, in the same attitude. Without looking round he said, ‘I’m Pascal Matra’s brother-in-law. In the visiting-room he told me to come to you if I needed help – to come in his name.’

‘Yes: Pascal’s a friend of mine. What do you want?’

‘I can’t keep my charger in any more. I’ve got dysentery. I don’t know who to trust and I’m afraid it’ll be stolen or the screws will find it. Please, Papillon, please carry it for me a few days.’ And he showed me a charger much bigger than mine. I was afraid he was setting a trap – asking me to find out whether I was carrying one myself. If I said I was not sure I could hold two, he’d know. Without any expression I said, ‘How much has it got in it?’

‘Twenty-five thousand francs.’

Without another word I took the charger – it was very clean, too – and there in front of him I shoved it up, wondering whether a man could hold two. I had no idea. I stood up, buttoned my trousers … it was all right. It did not worry me.

‘My name’s Ignace Galgani,’ he said, before going. ‘Thanks, Papillon.’

I went back to Dega and privately I told him about what had happened.

‘It’s not too heavy?’

‘No.’

‘Let’s forget it then.’

We tried to get in touch with men who were being sent back after having made a break: Julot or Guittou, if possible. We were eager for information – what it was like over there, how you were treated, how you ought to set about things so as to be left paired with a friend, and so on. As luck would have it we chanced upon a very odd guy, a case entirely on his own. He was a Corsican who had been born in the penal settlement. His father had been a warder there, living with his mother on the Isles du Salut. He had been born on the Ile Royale, one of the three – the others are Saint-Joseph and Devil’s Island. And (irony of fate!) he was on his way back, not as a warder’s son but as a convict.

He had copped twelve years for housebreaking. Nineteen: frank expression and open face. Both Dega and I saw at once that he had been sold down the river. He only had a vague notion of the underworld; but he would be useful to us because he could let us know about what was in store. He told us all about life on the islands, where he had lived for fourteen years. For example, he told us that his nurse on the islands had been a convict, a famous tough guy who had been sent down after a knife-fight in Montmartre, a duel for the love of the beautiful Casque d’Or. He gave us some very valuable advice – you had to make your break on the mainland, because on the islands it was no go at all: then again you mustn’t be listed dangerous, because with that against your name you would scarcely step ashore at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni before they shut you right away – interned you for a certain number of years or for life, according to how bad your label was. Generally speaking, less than five per cent of the convicts were interned on the islands. The others stayed on the mainland. The islands were healthy, but (as Dega had already told me) the mainland was a right mess that gradually ate the heart out of you with all sorts of diseases, death in various shapes, murder, etc.

Dega and I hoped not to be interned on the islands. But there was a hell of a feeling there in my throat – what if I had been labelled dangerous? What with my lifer, the business with Tribouillard and that other one with the governor, I’d be lucky to get away with it.

One day a rumour ran through the prison – don’t go to the sick-bay whatever happens, because everybody who is too weak or too ill to stand the voyage is poisoned. It was certainly all balls. And indeed a Parisian, Francis la Passe, told us there was nothing in it. There had been a type who died of poison there, but Francis’ own brother, who worked in the sick-bay, explained just what had happened.

The guy had killed himself. He was one of the top safebreaking specialists, and it seems that during the war he had burgled the German embassy in Geneva or Lausanne for the French Intelligence. He had taken some very important papers and had given them to the French agents. The police had brought him out of prison, where he was doing five years, specially for this job. And ever since 1920 he had lived quietly, just operating once or twice a year. Every time he was picked up he brought out his little piece of blackmail and the Intelligence people hurriedly stepped in. But this time it hadn’t worked. He’d got twenty years and he was to go off with us. So as to miss the boat he had pretended to be sick and had gone into hospital. According to Francis la Passe’s brother a tablet of cyanide had put paid to his capers. Safe deposits and the Intelligence Service could sleep in peace.

The courtyard was full of stories, some true, some false. We listened to them in either case – it passed the time.

Whenever I went to the latrines, either in the courtyard or in the cell, Dega had to go with me, on account of the chargers. He stood in front of me while I was at it and shielded me from over-inquisitive eyes. A charger is a bleeding nuisance at any time, but I had two of the things still, for Galgani was getting sicker and sicker. And there was a mystery about the whole affair: the charger I shoved up last always came out last, and the first always first. I’ve no idea how they turned about in my guts, but that’s how it was.

At the barber’s yesterday someone had a go at murdering Clousiot while he was being shaved. Two knife-stabs right next to his heart. By some miracle he didn’t die. I heard about the whole thing from a friend of his. It was an odd story and I’ll tell it one day. The attack was by way of settling accounts. The man who nearly got him died six years after this at Cayenne, having eaten bichromate of potassium in his lentils. He died in frightful agony. The attendant who helped the doctor at the post-mortem brought us five inches of gut. It had seventeen holes in it. Two months later this man’s murderer was found strangled in his hospital bed. We never knew who by.

It was twelve days now that we had been at Saint-Martin-de-Ré. The fortress was crammed to overflowing. Sentries patrolled on the ramparts night and day.

A fight broke out between two brothers, in the showers. They fought like wild-cats and one of them was put into our cell. André Baillard was his name. He couldn’t be punished, he told me, because it was the authorities’ fault: the screws had been ordered not to let the brothers meet on any account whatsoever. When you knew their story, you could see why.

André had murdered an old woman with some money, and his brother Emile hid the proceeds. Emile was shopped for theft and got three years. One day, when he was in the punishment cell with some other men, he let the whole thing out: he was mad with his brother for not sending him in money for cigarettes and he told them everything – he’d get Andre, he said; and he explained how it was André who had done the old woman in and how it was he, Emile, who had hidden the money. What’s more, he said, when he got out he wouldn’t give André a sou. A prisoner hurried off to tell the governor what he had heard. Things moved fast. André was arrested and the two brothers were sentenced to death. In death alley at the Santé their condemned cells were next door to one another. Each put in for a reprieve. Emile’s was granted the forty-third day, but André’s was turned down. Yet out of consideration for André’s feelings Emile was kept in the condemned cell and the two brothers did their daily exercise together, the one behind the other, with chains on their legs.

On the forty-sixth day at half-past four in the morning André’s door opened. They were all there, the governor, the registrar and the prosecuting counsel who had asked for his head. This was the execution. But just as the governor stepped forward to speak André’s lawyer appeared, running, followed by someone else who handed the prosecutor a paper. Everyone went back into the corridor. André’s throat was so tight and stiff he couldn’t swallow his spit. This wasn’t possible – executions were never interrupted once they had begun. And yet this one was. Not until the next day, after hours of dreadful doubt, did he hear from his lawyer that just before his execution President Doumer had been murdered by Gorguloff. But Doumer hadn’t died right away. The lawyer had stood there all night outside the hospital, having told the Minister of Justice that if the President died before the time of the execution (between half-past four and five in the morning) he would call for a postponement on the grounds that there was no head of state. Doumer died at two minutes past four. Just time to warn the ministry, jump into a cab, followed by the man with the order for putting it off; but he got there three minutes too late to stop them opening André’s door. The two brothers’ sentences were commuted to transportation and hard labour for life: for on the day of the new president’s election the lawyer went to Versailles, and as soon as Albert Lebrun was chosen, the lawyer handed him the petition for a reprieve. No president ever refuses the first reprieve he is asked for. ‘Lebrun signed,’ said Andre, ‘and here I am, mate, alive and well, on my way to Guiana.’ I looked at this character who had escaped the guillotine and I said to myself that in spite of all I had gone through it was nothing to what he must have suffered.

Yet I never made friends with him. The idea of his killing a poor old woman to rob her made me feel sick. This André was always a very lucky man. He murdered his brother on the Ile Saint-Joseph some time later. Several convicts saw him. Emile was fishing, standing there on a rock and thinking about nothing but his rod. The noise of the heavy waves drowned every other sound. André crept up on his brother from behind with a thick ten-foot bamboo in his hand and shoved him off his balance with a single push. The place was stiff with sharks and precious soon Emile had become their lunch. He wasn’t there at the evening roll-call and he was put down as having disappeared during an attempt to escape. No one talked about him any more. Only four or five convicts gathering coconuts high up on the island had seen what happened. Everyone knew, of course, except for the screws. André Baillard never heard another word about it.

He was let out of internment for ‘good conduct’ and he had a privileged status at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. They gave him a little cell to himself. He had a disagreement with another convict and one day he treacherously asked him into this cell: there he killed him with a stab right to the heart. They wore his plea of self-defence and he was acquitted. Then, when the penal settlement was abolished, he was pardoned, still on account of his ‘good conduct’.

Saint-Martin-de-Ré was stuffed with prisoners. Two quite different sorts: eight hundred or a thousand real convicts and nine relégués – men in preventive detention. To be a convict you have to have done something serious or at least to have been accused of an important crime. The mildest sentence is seven years hard labour and then it goes up by stages to life, or perpetuity, as they say. A commuted death-sentence automatically means perpetuity. Preventive detention, or relegation, that’s something quite different. If he’s sentenced from three to seven times, a man can be relegated. It’s true they’re all incorrigible thieves and you can see that society has to protect itself. But still it’s shameful that a civilized nation should have this extra sentence of preventive detention. They are small-time thieves – clumsy operators, since they are shopped so often – who get relegation (and in my time that meant the same as life) and who have never stolen as much as ten thousand francs in their whole career as thieves. That’s the greatest bit of meaningless balls French civilization has to offer. A nation has no right to revenge itself nor to wipe out the people who hinder the workings of society. They are people who ought to be treated rather than be punished in such an inhuman way.

Now we had been seventeen days at Saint-Martin-de-Ré. We knew the name of the ship that was to carry us to the settlement: she was the Martinière. She was going to take one thousand eight hundred and seventy prisoners aboard. That morning eight or nine hundred convicts were assembled in the inner court of the fortress. We had been standing there for about an hour, lined up in ranks of ten, filling the square. A gate opened and in came men who were not dressed like the warders we were used to. They wore good, military kind of clothes: sky-blue. It wasn’t the same as a gendarme and it wasn’t the same as a soldier. They each had a broad belt with a holster; the revolver grip showed. There were about eighty of them. Some had stripes. They were all sunburnt and they were of any age between thirty-five and fifty. The old ones looked pleasanter than the young, who threw a chest and looked important – gave themselves airs. Along with these men’s officers there came the governor of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, a gendarmerie colonel, three or four quacks in overseas army uniform and two priests in white cassocks. The gendarmerie colonel picked up a speaking-trumpet and put it to his mouth. We expected shun! but nothing of the kind. He said, ‘Listen carefully, all of you. From this moment on you are taken over by the authorities of the Ministry of Justice, representing the penitentiary administration of French Guiana, whose administrative centre is the town of Cayenne. Major Barrot, I hereby hand over to you the eight hundred and sixteen convicts now present, and this is the list of their names. Be so good as to check that they are all here.’

The roll-call began straight away. ‘So-and-so, present. So-and-so …’ etc. It lasted two hours and everything was correct. Then we watched the two authorities exchanging signatures on a little table brought for the purpose.

Major Barrot had as many stripes as the colonel, but they were gold and not the gendarmerie’s silver: he took his turn at the megaphone.

‘Transportees, from now on that is the name you’ll always be called by – transportee so-and-so or transportee such-and-such a number – the number that will be allotted to you. From now on you are under the special penal settlement laws and regulations: you come under its own particular tribunals which will take the necessary decision with regard to you as the case arises. For crimes committed in the penal settlement these courts can condemn you to anything from imprisonment to death. These disciplinary sentences, such as prison or solitary confinement, are of course served in different establishments that belong to the administration. The officers you see opposite you are called supervisors. When you speak to them you will say “Monsieur le surveillant” After you have eaten you will be given a kitbag containing the settlement uniform. Everything has been provided for and you will not need anything but what is in the bag. Tomorrow you will go aboard the Martinière. We shall travel together. Don’t lose heart at leaving this country: you will be better off in the settlement than in solitary confinement in France. You can talk, amuse yourselves, sing and smoke; and you needn’t be afraid of being treated roughly so long as you behave yourselves. I ask you to leave the settling of your private disagreements until we reach Guiana. During the voyage discipline has to be very strict, as I hope you will understand. If there are any men among you who don’t feel up to making the voyage, they may report to the infirmary, where they will be examined by the medical officers who are accompanying the convoy. I wish you all a pleasant trip.’ The ceremony was over.

‘Well, Dega, what do you think about it?’

‘Papillon, old cock, I see I was right when I told you that the other convicts were the worst danger we’d have to cope with. That piece of his about “leave the settling of your private disagreements until we reach Guiana” meant plenty. Christ, what killings and murdering must go on there!’

‘Never worry about that: just rely on me.’

I found Francis la Passe and said, ‘Is your brother still a medical attendant?’

‘Yes. He’s not a real convict, only a bleeding relégué.’

‘Get into touch with him as quick as possible: ask him to give you a scalpel. If he wants money for it, tell me how much. I’ll pay.’

Two hours later I had a very strong steel-handled scalpel. Its only fault was that it was rather big; but it was a formidable weapon.

I went and sat very near the latrines in the middle of the courtyard and I sent for Galgani to give him back his charger; but it was going to be very hard to find him in that milling crowd – a huge yard crammed with eight hundred men. We had never caught sight of Julot, Guittou or Suzini since we got there.

The advantage of communal life is that you belong to a new society, if this could be called a society – you live in it, talk in it, become part of it. There are so many things to say, to hear and to do that you no longer have any time to think. And it seemed to me, as I saw how the past faded away, growing less important in comparison with everyday life, it seemed to me that once you got to the penal settlement you must almost forget what you have been, how or why you had landed up there, and concentrate upon one thing alone – escape. I was wrong, because the most important and most engrossing thing is above all to keep yourself alive.

Where were the cops, the members of the jury, the assizes, the judges, my wife, my father, my friends? They were there all right, thoroughly alive, each one in his place in my heart; but what with the intense excitement of leaving, of this great leap into the unknown, these new friendships and new aspects of life, they seemed to have less importance than before. But that was only a mere impression. When I wanted, and whenever my mind chose to open each one’s file, they were all instantly alive once more.

Now here was Galgani, being led towards me, for even with his thick pebble-lenses he could scarcely see. He looked better. He came up to me and shook my hand without a word.

I said, ‘I want to give you back your charger. Now you’re well you can carry it yourself. It’s too much responsibility for me during the voyage; and then who knows whether we’ll be in touch at the settlement, or whether we’ll even see one another? So it’s better you should have it back.’ Galgani looked at me unhappily. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come into the latrine and I’ll give it back to you.’

‘No, I don’t want it. You keep it – I give it to you. It’s yours.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I don’t want to get myself murdered for my charger. I’d rather live without money than have my throat slit for it. I give it to you, for after all there’s no reason why you should risk your life, looking after my lolly for me. If you run the risk it might as well be for your own sake.’

‘You’re scared, Galgani. Have you been threatened already? Does anyone suspect you’re loaded?’

‘Yes: there are three Arabs who follow me all the time. That’s why I’ve never come to see you, so they won’t suspect we’re in touch. Every time I go to the latrine, day or night, one of these three comes and puts himself next to me. Without making it obvious I’ve shown them absolutely plain that I’m not loaded, but in spite of all I can do they never let up. They think someone else has my charger; they don’t know who; and they keep behind me to see when I’ll get it back again.’

I looked hard at Galgani and I saw he was terror-stricken, really persecuted. I said, ‘What part of the courtyard do they keep to?’

He said, ‘Over towards the kitchen and the laundry.’

‘Right, you stay here. I’ll be back. But no, now I come to think of it, you come with me.’ With Galgani at my side I went over towards the Arabs. I’d taken the scalpel out of my cap and I had the blade up my right sleeve, with the handle in my palm. When we had crossed the court, sure enough I saw them. Four of them. Three Arabs and a Corsican, a character by the name of Girando. I grasped the situation right away. It was the Corsican who had been cold-shouldered by the real hard men and who had put the Arabs up to this job. He must have known that Galgani was Pascal Matra’s brother-in-law and that it wasn’t possible for him not to have a charger.

‘Hi, Mokrane. OK?’

‘OK, Papillon. You OK too?’

‘Hell, no. Far from it. I’ve come to see you guys to tell you Galgani is my friend. If anything happens to him, it’s you who cop it first, Girando. And then the rest of you. And you can take that just how you like.’

Mokrane stood up. He was as tall as me – about five foot eight – and as broad-shouldered. The words had needled him and he was on the point of moving in to start things when I flashed the scalpel and with it right there shining-new in my hand I said, ‘If you stir I’ll kill you like a dog.’

He was knocked sideways by seeing me armed in a place where everybody was searched all the time, and he was shaken by my attitude and the length of the blade. He said, ‘I got up to talk, not to fight.’

I knew it was not true, but it was to my advantage to save his face in front of his friends. I left the door open for him wide and handsome. ‘OK, since you just got up to talk … ‘

‘I didn’t know Galgani was your friend. I thought he was a square. And you know very well, Papillon, that when you’re skint you have to find cash somewhere to make a break.’

‘Fair enough. You certainly have the right to struggle for your life, Mokrane, like anyone else. Only keep away from Galgani, see? You’ve got to look somewhere else.’

He held out his hand: I shook it hard. Jesus, I was well out of that one; for looking at it rightly, if I had killed that guy, I should never have left the next day. A little later I realized I had made a bleeding error. Galgani and I walked away. I said, ‘Don’t tell anyone about this caper. I don’t want to have old Dega bawling me out.’

I tried to persuade Galgani to take the charger. He said, ‘Tomorrow, before we leave.’ The next day he lay so low that I set out for penal with two chargers aboard.

That night not one of us – and we were about eleven in the cell – not one of us said a word. For we all had more or less the same thought in our minds – this was the last day we should pass on French soil. Each of us was more or less filled with homesickness at the idea of leaving France for ever, with an unknown land and an unknown way of life at the end of our journey.

Dega did not speak. He sat next to me close to the barred door on to the corridor, where the air was a little fresher. I felt completely at sea. The information we had about what was coming was so contradictory that I did not know whether to be pleased or wretched or downright hopeless.

The other men in the cell were all genuine underworld characters. The only one who did not belong was the little Corsican who had been born in the settlement. All these men were in a grey, floating state of mind. The seriousness of the moment and its importance had made them almost entirely dumb. The cigarette-smoke wafted out of the cell into the corridor like a cloud, and if you didn’t want your eyes to sting you had to sit lower than the heavy fog-blanket. No one slept except for André Baillard; it was natural enough for him, since his life had already been lost, as it were. As far as he was concerned everything else could only be unlooked-for heaven.

My life passed before my eyes like a film – childhood in a family filled with love, affectionate discipline, decent ways and good-heartedness; the wild flowers, the murmur of streams, the taste of the walnuts, peaches and plums that our garden gave us in such quantities; the smell of the mimosa that flowered every spring in front of our door; the outside of our house, and the inside with my family there – all this ran by before my eyes. It was a talking picture, one in which I heard the voice of my mother (she had loved me so), and then my father’s – always affectionate and kind – and the barking of Clara, his gun-dog, calling me into the garden to play. The boys and girls of my childhood, the ones I had played with during the happiest days of my life. All this – this film I was watching without ever having meant to see it, this magic lantern that my subconscious had lit against my will – all this filled the night of waiting before the leap into the great unknown with sweet, gentle memories and emotions.

Now was the time to get things clear in my mind. Let’s see: I was twenty-six and very fit; I had five thousand six hundred francs belonging to me in my gut and twenty-five thousand belonging to Galgani. Dega, there beside me, had ten thousand. It seemed to me I could count on forty thousand francs, for if Galgani couldn’t look after his dough here he’d be even less capable of doing so aboard the ship or in Guiana. What’s more, he knew it: and that’s why he never came to ask for his charger. So I could count on that money – taking Galgani with me, of course. He’d have to profit by it – it was his cash, not mine. I’d use it for his good; but I should gain by it too. Forty thousand francs was a lot of money, so I should find it easy to buy helpers – convicts serving their time, men who had been let out, warders.

The conclusion was positive. As soon as I got there I must escape together with Dega and Galgani, and that was the only thing I was to concentrate upon at this point. I touched the scalpel, and the feel of the cold steel handle pleased me. It gave me confidence, having such a formidable weapon as that upon me. I had already proved how useful it could be in that business with the Arabs.

About three o’clock in the morning the men for solitary piled up eleven kitbags in front of the bars of the cell: they were all crammed full and each had a big label on it. I could read one that hung in through the bars. C –, Pierre, thirty years old, five foot eight and a half, waist size forty-two, shoes eight and a half, number x. This Pierre C – was Pierrot le Fou, a guy from Bordeaux who had got twenty years hard in Paris for homicide.

He was a good type, a decent, straightforward member of the underworld, and I knew him well. The label showed me how precise and well-organized the authorities in charge of the penal settlement were. It was better than the army, where they make you try your things on by guesswork. Here everything was written down and so each man would get things his own size. I could see from a bit of canvas at the top of the bag that the uniform was white with vertical red stripes. Dressed like that, you could scarcely pass unnoticed.

I tried to force my mind to make pictures of the assizes, the jurymen, the prosecuting counsel, etc. It flatly refused to obey me, and I could only get it to produce ordinary images. It came to me that if you want to live through anything imaginary as vividly as I did at the Conciergerie or at Beaulieu you have to be alone, utterly alone. It was a relief to understand this, and I saw that the communal life that was coming would bring other needs with it, other reactions and other plans.

Pierrot le Fou came up to the bars and said, ‘OK, Papi?’

‘What about you?’

‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, I’d always dreamed of going to America; but I was a gambler, so I could never save enough for the trip. The cops had the idea of making me a present of it. You can’t deny it was kind of them, Papillon.’ He was speaking naturally. There was no bragging about what he said. You could feel that right down he was sure of himself. ‘The cops’ free trip to America has something to be said for it, you know. I’d much rather go to Guiana than sweat out fifteen years of solitary in France.’

‘As I see it going crazy in a cell or just falling apart in some solitary confinement hole in France is even worse than dying of leprosy or yellow fever.’

‘That’s how I see it too,’ he said.

‘Look, Pierrot, this label is yours.’

He bent down, looking very close to read it, and slowly he made out the words. ‘I can’t wait to put these clothes on. I’ve a mind to open the bag – no one will say anything. After all, they’re meant for me.’

‘You leave it alone and wait till they tell you. This isn’t the time to ask for trouble, Pierre. I need some peace and quiet.’ He grasped what I meant and moved away from the bars.

Louis Dega looked at me and said, ‘This is our last night, boy. Tomorrow they’re taking us far away from our beautiful country.’

‘Our beautiful country hasn’t got such a very beautiful system of justice, Dega. Maybe we’ll come to know countries that aren’t so beautiful but that have a slightly more human way of treating people who have slipped up.’ I didn’t think I was so near the truth: the future was to show me that I was dead right. Total silence fell again.

Leaving for Guiana

Six o’clock, and everything was in motion. Convicts came round with coffee and then four warders appeared. Today they were in white; they still carried their revolvers. Spotless white tunics and buttons that shone like gold. One had three gold chevrons on his left sleeve: nothing on his shoulders.

‘Transportees, come out into the corridor in twos. Each man will find the bag with his name on the label. Take the bag and move back against the wall, facing the corridor with your bag in front of you.’

It took twenty minutes before we were all lined up with our kitbags at our feet.

‘Strip: roll up your things, put them into the jacket, bundle it all up and tie the sleeves … right. You over there, pick up the rolls and put them into the cell. Now dress. Put on vest, drawers, striped drill trousers, drill jacket, shoes and socks … You’re all dressed?’

‘Yes, Monsieur le surveillant.’

‘Right. Keep the woollen jersey out of the bag in case it rains or turns cold. Bags on your left shoulder. In double file, follow me.’

With the sergeant in front, two warders at the sides and the fourth behind, our little column moved out to the courtyard. In under two hours eight hundred and ten convicts were lined up there. Forty men were called out, including Dega and me and the three who were being sent back after their escape – Julot, Galgani and Santini. These forty men were lined up in rows of ten. Each rank of the column that was taking shape had a warder beside it. No chains, no handcuffs. Three yards in front of us, walking backwards, ten gendarmes. They faced us, rifle in hand, and they marched like that all the way, each steered by another gendarme holding his shoulder-belt.

The great gate of the citadel opened, and slowly the column began to move. As the line emerged from the fortress so more gendarmes, carrying rifles or light machine-guns, joined the convoy, staying a couple of yards from it and keeping pace. Other gendarmes held back a huge crowd that had come to watch us leaving for the penal settlements. Half way to the quay I heard a quiet whistle from the windows of a house. I looked up and saw Nénette, my wife, and my friend Antoine D – at one window; Paula, Dega’s wife, and his friend Antoine Giletti were at the other. Dega saw them too, and we marched with our eyes fixed on those windows as long as we could see them. That was the last time I ever set eyes on my wife: or my friend Antoine, who died much later in an air-raid on Marseilles. No one spoke. There was a total silence. No prisoner, no warder, no gendarme, no person in the crowd disturbed that truly heart-rending moment when everyone knew that one thousand eight hundred men were about to vanish from ordinary life for ever.

We went aboard. The forty in front – that is to say us – were sent to the bottom of the hold, into a cage with thick bars. There was a marker on it. I read ‘Hall no. 1. 40 men top special category. Strict, continual surveillance.’ Each man was given a rolled-up hammock. There were quantities of rings to hang them by. Someone seized me in his arms: it was Julot. He knew all about this, because he had already made the voyage ten years before. He knew how to cope. He said, ‘This way, quick. Hang your bag where you’re going to hang your hammock. This place is near two closed port-holes, but they’ll be opened when we’re at sea, and we’ll be able to breathe better here than anywhere else in the cage.’

I introduced Dega. We were talking when a man came our way. Julot put out his arm and blocked the path. He said, ‘Never come over this side if you want to reach penal alive. Get it?’ ‘Yes,’ said the other man. ‘You know why?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then bugger off.’ The guy went. Dega was delighted with this show of strength and he didn’t hide it. ‘With you two, I’ll be able to sleep easy.’ Julot said, ‘With us, you’re safer here than in any villa on the coast that has a single window open.’

The voyage lasted eighteen days. Only one piece of excitement. Everyone was woken by an enormous shriek in the night. A character was found dead with a long knife deep between his shoulders. The knife had been driven from below upwards and it had passed through the hammock before reaching him. A really dangerous weapon, a good eight inches long in the blade. Immediately twenty-five or thirty warders turned their revolvers or rifles on us, shouting, ‘Everyone strip. Double quick time!’

Everyone stripped. I saw there was going to be a search and I put my bare right foot over the scalpel, taking my weight on the left, because the blade was cutting into me. Nevertheless my foot covered the scalpel. Four warders came inside the cage and began rummaging through the shoes and clothes. Before they came in they left their weapons outside and the door was closed on them, but those who were the other side of the bars kept watch on us, keeping us covered. ‘The first man to stir is a goner,’ said a head screw’s voice. During the search they found three knives, two long roofing-nails, sharpened, a corkscrew, and a gold charger. Six men were brought out on to the deck, still naked. Major Barrot, the officer in command of the convoy, appeared together with two colonial army doctors and the captain of the ship. When the screws left our cage everyone dressed again, without waiting for the order. I picked up my scalpel.

The warders moved back to the far end of the deck. In the middle there was Barrot, just by the companion-way, with the other officers. The six naked men were lined up opposite them, standing to attention.

‘This is his,’ said the screw who had conducted the search, picking up a knife and pointing to its owner.

‘Fair enough. It’s mine.’

‘Right,’ said Barrot. ‘He’ll make the rest of the voyage in a cell over the engines.’

Each man was pointed out as responsible either for the nails, or the corkscrew or the knives, and each acknowledged that the weapon that had been found belonged to him. Each one, still naked, went up the ladder, accompanied by two screws. Lying there on the floor there was still one knife and the gold charger: and only one man for both of them. He was young – twenty-three or twenty-five – well-built, at least five foot ten, athletic, blue eyes.

‘This is yours, isn’t it?’ said the screw, holding out the gold charger.

‘Yes, it’s mine.’

‘What’s in it?’ asked Major Barrot, taking it.

‘Three hundred pounds sterling, two hundred dollars and two five-carat diamonds.’

‘Right. We’ll have a look.’ He opened it. The major was surrounded by other people and we couldn’t see a thing. But we heard him say, ‘Just so. What’s your name?’

‘Salvidia Romeo.’

‘You’re Italian?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’ll not be punished for the charger: but you will be for the knife.’

‘Excuse me, but the knife isn’t mine.’

‘Don’t talk balls,’ said the screw, ‘I found it in your shoe.’

‘I say again the knife isn’t mine.’

‘So I’m lying, am I?’

‘No, you’re just mistaken.’

‘Whose is the knife, then?’ asked Major Barrot. ‘If it’s not yours, it must be somebody’s.’

‘It’s not mine, that’s all.’

‘If you don’t want to be put in the punishment cell – and you’ll fry there, because it’s over the boiler – just tell me whose the knife is.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you trying to make a fool of me? A knife’s found in your shoe and you don’t know whose it is? Do you think I’m a fool? Either it’s yours or you know whose it is. Speak up.’

‘It’s not mine and it’s not for me to say whose it is. I’m not an informer. You don’t by any chance think I look like a bleeding prison officer, do you?’

‘Warder, put on the handcuffs. This kind of undisciplined conduct costs a packet, my friend.’

The two commanding officers, the captain of the ship and the head of the convoy, talked privately. The captain gave an order to a quartermaster, who went up on deck. A few moments later a Breton sailor appeared, a giant of a man, with a wooden bucket of sea water and a rope as thick as your wrist. The convict was tied to the bottom step of the ladder, on his knees. The sailor wetted the rope in the bucket and then deliberately, with all his strength, he set about flogging the poor devil’s back and buttocks. Not a sound came from the convict: blood flowed from his buttocks and his sides. A shout from our cage broke the graveyard silence. ‘You bloody sods!’

That was all that was needed to start everybody roaring. ‘Murderers! Swine! Bastards!’ The more they threatened to fire if we did not shut up the more we bellowed until suddenly the captain shouted, ‘Turn on the steam!’

Sailors turned various wheels and jets of steam shot out at us with such force that in a split second everyone was flat on his belly. The jets came at chest-height. We were all struck with panic. The men who had been scalded dared not cry out. The whole thing lasted under a minute, but it terrified every man there.

‘I hope you obstinate brutes have grasped what I mean. The slightest trouble, and I turn on the steam. You get me? Stand up!’

Only three men had been seriously scalded. They were taken to the sick-bay. The man who had been flogged was put back with us. Six years later he died while making a break with me.

During those eighteen days of the voyage we had plenty of time to try to learn about what was coming or to get at least some notion of the penal settlement. Yet when we got this nothing turned out quite as we had expected, although Julot had done his very best to pass on his knowledge.

We did know that Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was a village seventy-five miles from the sea on a river called the Maroni. Julot told us about it. ‘That’s the village that has the prison, the one that’s the centre of the penal settlement. That’s where they sort you out according to your category. The preventive detentions go straight to a prison called Saint-Jean, about ninety miles away. The right convicts are separated into three groups. First the ones labelled very dangerous: as soon as they arrive they’re called out and shoved into cells in the punishment-block until they can be transferred to the Iles du Salut. There they are interned either for a given number of years or for life. These islands are three hundred miles and more from Saint-Laurent and sixty from Cayenne. There are three of them. Royale, the biggest; Saint-Joseph, which has the settlement’s solitary-confinement prison; and Devil’s Island, the smallest of them all. Apart from a very few exceptions, convicts don’t go to Devil’s Island. The people there are politicals. Then comes dangerous, second category: they stay at the Saint-Laurent camp, and they’re put to gardening and working on the land. Whenever there’s a need for men they’re sent to the very tough camps – Camp Forestier, Charvin, Cascade, Crique Rouge and Kilometre 42, the one they call the death camp. Then there’s the ordinary category: they’re given jobs in the offices and kitchens, or put to cleaning in the village and the camp, or they’re sent to the different workshops – carpentry, painting, blacksmith’s shop, electricity, mattress-making, tailor’s shop, laundry and so on. So zero hour is the moment you get there. If you’re called out and taken to a cell, that means you’re going to be interned on the islands, so good-bye to any hope of escape. There’s only one chance, and that’s to mutilate yourself quick – open your knee or your belly so as to get into the hospital and escape from there. At all costs you have to avoid going to the islands. There’s one other hope: if the ship that’s to take the internees to the islands isn’t ready you can bring out your money and offer it to the medical orderly. He’ll give you a shot of turpentine in a joint or draw a urine-soaked hair through a cut so that it’ll go bad. Or he’ll give you sulphur to inhale and then tell the doctor you’ve got a temperature of 102. During those few days of waiting you have to get into hospital, no matter what it costs.

‘If you’re not called out but left with the others in the huts at the camp, then you have time to get working. If this happens, you mustn’t look for a job inside the camp. What you want to do is to pay the clerk to be given a scavenger’s or a sweeper’s job in the village, or else to get taken on at an outside firm’s sawmills. Going out of the prison to work and coming back into the camp every night gives you time to get in touch with the time-expired convicts who live in the village or with the Chinese, so that they can get your break ready for you. Avoid the camps outside the village. Everybody dies quickly in them – there are some where no one has been able to stand it for three months. Out there in the deep bush, men are forced to cut a cubic yard of wood every day.’

Throughout the voyage Julot had gone over and over all this valuable information. For his part, he was quite ready. He knew that he was going straight to the punishment cell, because he was an escaped man who had been retaken. So he had a very small blade, not much more than a penknife, in his charger. When we got there he was going to take it out and rip his knee open. As we came down the gangway he was going to fall, right there in front of everyone. He thought he’d be taken straight from the quay to the hospital. And that indeed was exactly what happened.

Saint-Laurent-Du-Maroni

The warders had gone off in relays to change. Each in turn came back dressed in white with a sun-helmet instead of a kepi. Julot said. ‘We’re almost there.’ It was appallingly hot, for they had shut the port-holes. Through the glass you could see the bush. So we were in the Maroni. The water was muddy. Untouched virgin forest, green and impressive. Disturbed by the ship’s siren, birds rose and flew across the sky. We went very slowly, and that allowed us to pay close attention to the thick, dark-green, overflowing vegetation. We saw the first wooden houses, with their corrugated iron roofs. Black men and women stood at their doors, watching the ship go by. They were quite used to seeing it unload its human cargo, and so they never even bothered to wave as it passed. Three blasts on the siren and the churning of the propeller told us that we were there, and then the engines stopped entirely. Not a sound: you could have heard the buzzing of a fly.

Nobody spoke. Julot had his knife open and he was cutting his trousers at the knee, making the edges of the slash look like a tear. It was only on deck that he was going to cut his knee, so as not to leave a trail of blood. The warders opened the door of the cage and lined us up in threes. We were in the fourth rank, with Julot between Dega and me. Up on deck. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and suddenly the blazing sun hit my cropped head and my eyes. We were formed up on the deck and then we moved towards the gangway. When the column hesitated for a moment, just as the first man stepped on to the gangway. I held Julot’s kitbag in place on his shoulder while he used both hands to stretch the skin of his knee, drive the knife in and slash through three or four inches of flesh in one sweep. He passed me the knife and held the kitbag himself. The moment we set foot on the gangway he fell and rolled right down to the bottom. They picked him up, and finding that he was hurt they called the stretcher-bearers. Everything ran just as he had worked it out, and he disappeared, carried by two men on a stretcher.

A motley crowd watched us with some curiosity. Negroes, half-castes, Indians, Chinese and wrecks of white men (they were certainly freed convicts) stared at each one of us as he set foot on land and lined up behind the others. On the other side there were warders, well-dressed civilians, women in summer dresses and children, all with sun-helmets on. They too watched the new arrivals. When there were two hundred of us ashore, the column moved off. We marched for some ten minutes and came to a very high gate made of massive beams, with the words Penitentiary of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. Capacity, 3,000 men. The gate opened and we went in by ranks of ten. ‘Left, right. Left, right. Left, right!’ A good many convicts watched us come in. They had climbed up on the windows or on big stones to see us better.

When we reached the middle of the court a voice shouted, ‘Halt. Put your bags down in front of you. You there, hand out the hats.’ They gave us each a straw hat, and we needed it – two or three men had already dropped from sunstroke. Dega and I exchanged a glance, for a screw with stripes had a list in his hand. We thought of what Julot had told us. Guittou was called. ‘Here!’ he said. Two warders took him away. Suzuni, the same: Girasol likewise.

‘Jules Pignard!’

‘Jules Pignard (that was our Julot) has been hurt. He’s gone to hospital.’

‘Right.’ Those were the internees for the islands. Then the warder went on, ‘Listen carefully. Each man whose name I call is to step from the ranks with his kitbag on his shoulder and go and line up in front of that yellow hut, number one.’

The roll-call went on, with So-and-so – Present, etc., and Dega, Carrier and I ended up with the others, in line over against the hut. They opened the door and we went into a rectangular hall some twenty yards long. Down the middle ran a passage about two yards wide with an iron bar on either side, the whole length of the room. Canvas hammocks were slung between the bar and the wall, and each held a blanket. Every man chose his own place. Dega, Pierrot le Fou, Santori, Grandet and I moved in all next to one another, and little groups began to take shape at once. I went down to the far end of the room: showers on the right, latrines on the left: no running water.

The men who had left the ship after us began to arrive, and we watched them, clinging to the bars over the windows. Louis Dega, Pierrot le Fou and I were delighted – since we were in an ordinary barrack-room it meant we weren’t going to be interned. Otherwise we’d already have been put into a cell, as Julot had explained. Everybody was very pleased until about five o’clock, when it was all over; but then Grandet said, ‘It’s funny, but they haven’t called out a single man for internment in this whole convoy. Odd. Still, so much the better, as far as I’m concerned.’ Grandet was the man who stole the safe from one of the central prisons, a job that had made the whole country laugh.

In the tropics day and night come without any sort of twilight. You go straight from the one to the other, and at the same time all through the year. Suddenly, at half-past six, it’s night. And at half-past six two old convicts brought two oil lamps that they hung on a hook in the ceiling and that gave a very little light. Three-quarters of the room was perfectly dark. By nine o’clock everybody was asleep, for now that the excitement of our arrival was over, we were quite overcome by the heat. Not a breath of air, and everyone was stripped to his drawers. My hammock was between Dega and Pierrot le Fou: we whispered a while and then went back to sleep.

It was still dark the next morning when the bugle blew. Everyone got up, washed and dressed. They gave us coffee and a hunk of bread. There was a plank fixed to the wall for your bread, mug and other belongings. At nine o’clock two warders came in, together with a young convict dressed in white without stripes. The two screws were Corsicans, and they talked Corsican to the convicts from their country. Meanwhile the medical orderly walked about the room. When he reached me he said, ‘How goes it, Papi? Don’t you recognize me?’

‘No.’

‘I’m Sierra l’Algérois: I knew you in Paris, at Dante’s.’

‘Oh, yes, I recognize you now. But you were sent down in ’29. It’s ’33 now: how come you’re still here?’

‘Yes. There’s no getting out of here in a hurry. You report sick, will you? Who’s this guy?’

‘He’s Dega, a friend of mine.’

‘I’ll put you down for the doctor too, Dega. Papi, you’ve got dysentery. And you, dad, you’ve got fits of asthma. I’ll see you at the medical at eleven o’clock. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ He went on his way, calling out ‘Who’s sick there?’, going over to those who held up their hands, and writing down their names. When he came back he had a warder with him, an elderly sunburnt man. ‘Papillon, let me introduce my boss, Medical-Warder Bartiloni. Monsieur Bartiloni, these two are the friends I told you about.’

‘OK, Sierra, we’ll see to that at the medical: rely on me.’

At eleven they came for us. There were nine men going sick. We walked through the camp among the hutments. When we reached a newer building than the rest, the only one painted white with a red cross on it, we went in and found a waiting-room with about sixty men in it. Two warders in each corner. Sierra appeared, in spotless medical overalls. He said, ‘You, you and you: go in.’ We went into a room that was obviously the doctor’s. He talked to the three older men in Spanish. There was one Spaniard there I recognized straight away: he was Fernandez, the one who killed the three Argentines at the Cafe de Madrid in Paris. After they had exchanged a few words Sierra showed him to a little room communicating with the main hall and then came back to us. ‘Papi, let me embrace you. I’m delighted to be able to do you and your friend a very good turn. You’re both of you down for internment … No, let me finish. You’re down for life, Papillon; and Dega, you’re down for five years. You got any cash?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then give five hundred francs apiece and tomorrow morning you’ll be sent to hospital. You for dysentery. And you, Dega, you must bang on the door during the night – or better still, let someone call the screw and ask for the orderly, because Dega’s asthma’s killing him. I’ll look after the rest of it. There’s just one thing I ask of you, Papillon, and that is to give me fair warning if you clear out: I’ll be there when you say. They’ll be able to keep you in the hospital for a month, at a hundred francs a week each. You must move fast.’

Fernandez came out of the little room and in front of us he handed Sierra five hundred francs. Then I went in, and when I came out I gave him not a thousand but fifteen hundred francs. He refused the five hundred. I did not like to press him. He said, ‘This dough you’re giving me’s for the screw. I don’t want anything for myself. We’re friends, aren’t we?’

The next day Dega, Fernandez and I were in an enormous cell in the hospital. Dega was hurried in during the middle of the night. The attendant in charge of the ward was a man of thirty-five called Chatal. He knew all about us three from Sierra. When the doctor came round he was to show a motion that would make me look like I was falling apart with amoebas. Ten minutes before the inspection he was to burn a little sulphur for Dega and make him breathe the gas with a towel over his head. Fernandez had an enormously swollen face: he had pierced the skin inside his cheek and had blown as hard as he could for an hour. He had done it so conscientiously that the swelling closed one eye. The cell was on the first floor and there were about seventy patients in it, many of them dysentery cases. I asked Chatal where Julot was. He said, ‘In the building just over the way. You want me to tell him something?’

‘Yes. Tell him Papillon and Dega are here; ask him to show himself at the window.’

The attendant could come and go as he liked. All he had to do was to knock at the ward door and an Arab would open it. The Arab was a turnkey, a convict acting as an auxiliary to the warders. There were chairs on the right and the left of the door, and three warders sat there, rifles on their knees. The bars over the windows were lengths of railway line: I wondered how one could ever get through them. I sat there at the window.

Between our building and Julot’s there was a garden full of pretty flowers. Julot appeared at a window: he had a slate in his hand, and he had chalked BRAVO on it. An hour later the attendant brought me a letter from him. It said, ‘I’m trying to get into your ward. If I fail, try to get into mine. The reason is you’ve got enemies in your ward. So it seems you’re interned? Keep your heart up: we’ll do them in the eye yet.’

Julot and I were very close to one another because of that business at Beaulieu, where we had suffered together. Julot specialized in the use of a wooden mallet, and that was why they called him the hammer-man. He would drive up to a jeweller’s shop in the middle of the day, when all the finest jewels were on show in their cases. Someone else would be at the wheel, and they’d pull up with the engine running. Julot hopped out with his mallet, smashed the window with one blow, grabbed as many jewel-cases as he could hold and darted back into the car, which shot away with a scream of tyres. He brought it off in Lyons, Angers, Tours and Le Havre, and then he had a go at a big Paris shop, at three in the afternoon, getting away with jewels to the value of close on a million. He never told me how or why he was identified. He was sentenced to twenty years and he escaped at the end of four. And as he told us, it was in coming back to Paris that he was arrested: he was looking for his fence, so as to kill him, for the fence had never given Julot’s sister the large sum he owed him. The fence saw him prowling in the street where he lived and tipped off the police. Julot was picked up and he went back to Guiana with us.

It was a week now that we had been in hospital. Yesterday I gave Chatal two hundred francs: that was the weekly price for keeping both of us. By way of making ourselves popular we gave tobacco to the people who had nothing to smoke. A sixty-year-old tough guy from Marseilles, one Carora, had made friends with Dega. He was his adviser. Many times a day he told him that if he had plenty of money and it was known in the village (the French papers gave the news about all the important cases), then it was much better for him not to escape, because the freed convicts would kill him for his charger. Old Dega told me about his conversations with old Carora. It was in vain that I said the antique was certainly no sort of use, since he had stayed here for twenty years: he paid no attention. The old man’s tales made a great impression on Dega, and although I kept his courage up as well as I could it was heavy going.

I sent a note to Sierra asking him to let me see Galgani. It didn’t take long. Galgani was in hospital the next day, but in an unbarred ward. How was I to set about giving him back his charger? I told Chatal it was absolutely necessary for me to talk to Galgani: I let him imagine we were preparing a break. He told me he could bring him at five to twelve on the nose. Just as the guard was being changed he would bring him up on to the verandah to talk to me through the window; and he’d do it for nothing. Galgani was brought to me at the window at noon: straight away I put his charger into his hands. He stood there before me and wept. Two days later I had a magazine from him with five thousand-franc notes in it and the single word, Thanks.

Chatal passed me the magazine; and he had seen the money. He did not mention it, but I wanted to give him some: he would not take it. I said, ‘We want to get out. Would you like to come with us?’

‘No, Papillon, I’m fixed elsewhere. I don’t want to try to escape for five months, when my mate will be free. The break will be better prepared that way, and it’ll be more certain. Being down for internment, I know you’re in a hurry: but getting out of here, with all these bars, is going to be very difficult. Don’t count on me to help you – I don’t want to risk my job. Here I can wait in peace until my friend comes out.’

‘OK, Chatal. It’s better to speak straight. I won’t ever talk to you about this again.’

‘But still,’ he said, ‘I’ll carry notes for you and deliver messages.’

‘Thanks, Chatal.’

That night we heard bursts of machine-gun fire. Next day we heard it was the hammer-man who had got away. God be with him: he was a good friend. He must have seen a chance and made the most of it. So much the better for him.

Fifteen years later, in 1948, I was in Haiti, and there, together with a Venezuelan millionaire, I was working out a deal with the chief of the casino for a contract to run the gambling in those parts. One night I came out of a club where we had been drinking champagne, and one of the girls who was with us – coal-black, but as well brought up as the daughter of a good French provincial family – said to me, ‘My grandmother’s a voodoo priestess, and she lives with an old Frenchman. He escaped from Cayenne. He’s been with us now for fifteen years, and he’s almost always drunk, Jules Marteau is his name.’

I sobered up instantly. ‘Chick, you take me to your grandma’s right away.’

She spoke to the cab-driver in Haitian patois and he drove off at full speed. We passed a night-bar, still open and all lit up. ‘Stop.’ I went in, bought a bottle of Pernod, two of champagne and two of local rum. ‘Let’s go.’ We reached a pretty little red tiled white house on the beach. The sea almost lapped its steps. The girl knocked and knocked, and first there came out a big black woman with completely white hair. She was wearing a wrapper that came down to her ankles. The two women spoke in patois and then she said, ‘Come in, Monsieur: the house is all yours.’ An acetylene lamp lit up a very clean room, filled with birds and fishes. ‘Would you like to see Julot? He’s just coming. Jules! Jules! Here’s someone who wants to see you.’

An old man appeared, barefoot and wearing striped blue pyjamas that reminded me of our prison uniform. ‘Why, Snowball, who can be coming to see me at this time of night? Papillon! No! It can’t be true!’ He clasped me in his arms. He said, ‘Bring the lamp closer, Snowball, so that I can see my old friend’s face. It’s you all right, mate! It’s certainly you! Welcome, welcome, welcome! This kip, what little dough I’ve got, and my old woman’s grand-daughter – they’re all yours. You only have to say the word.’

We drank the Pernod, the champagne and the rum; and from time to time Julot sang. ‘So we did them in the eye after all, didn’t we, Papi? There’s nothing like bashing around. Take me, I came through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Jamaica; and then, about fifteen years ago now, I reached here; and I’m happy with Snowball – she’s the best woman a man could ask for. When are you leaving? Are you here for long?’

‘No. A week.’

‘What did you come for?’

‘To take over the casino, with a contract between us and the president himself.’

‘Brother, I’d love you to spend the rest of your life here with me in this bleeding wilderness; but if it’s the president you’re in touch with, don’t you fix any sort of deal at all. He’ll have you killed the minute he sees your joint is making a go of it.’

‘Thanks for the advice.’

‘Hey there, Snowball! Get ready for your not-for-tourists voodoo dance. The one and only genuine article for my friend.’ Another time I’ll tell you about this terrific not-for-tourists voodoo dance.

So Julot escaped, and here were we, Dega, Fernandez and me, still hanging about. Now and then, without seeming to, I looked at the bars over the windows. They were lengths of genuine railway line and there was nothing to be done about them. The only possibility was the door. It was guarded night and day by three armed warders. Since Julot’s escape the watch had been much sharper. The patrols came round at shorter intervals and the doctor was not so friendly. Chatal only came into the ward twice a day, to give the injections and to take the temperatures. A second week went by and once more I paid two hundred francs. Dega talked about everything except escape. Yesterday he saw my scalpel and he said, ‘You’ve still got that? What for?’

Angrily I replied, ‘To look after myself, and you too if necessary.’

Fernandez was not a Spaniard: he was an Argentine. He was a fine sort of a man, a genuine high-flier; but old Carora’s crap had left its mark on him too. One day I heard him say to Dega. ‘It seems the islands are very healthy, not like here: and it’s not hot over there. You can catch dysentery in this ward just going to the lavatory, because you may pick up germs.’ In this ward of seventy men, one or two died of dysentery every day. It was an odd thing, but they all died at low tide in the afternoon or the evening. No sick man ever died in the morning. Why? One of nature’s mysteries.

Tonight I had an argument with Dega. I told him that sometimes the Arab turnkey was stupid enough to come in at night and pull the sheet off the faces of the very sick men who had covered themselves up. We could knock him out and put on his clothes (we wore shirt and sandals – that was all). Once dressed I’d go out, suddenly snatch a rifle from one of the screws, cover them, make them go into a cell and close the door. Then we’d jump the hospital wall on the Maroni side, drop into the water and let ourselves go with the current. After that we’d make up our minds what to do next. Since we had money, we could buy a boat and provisions to get away by sea. Both of them turned my plan down flat, and they even criticized it. I felt they’d quite lost their guts: I was bitterly disappointed: and the days dropped by.

Now it was three weeks all but two days we had been here. There were ten left to try making a dash for it, or fifteen at the most. Today, 21 November 1933, a day not to be forgotten, Joanes Clousiot came into the ward – the man they had tried to murder at Saint-Martin, in the barber’s. His eyes were closed and almost sightless: they were full of pus. As soon as Chatal had gone I went over to him. Quickly he told me that the other men for internment had gone off to the islands more than a fortnight ago, but he had been overlooked. Three days back a clerk had given him the word. He had put a castor-oil seed in each eye, and all this pus had got him into hospital. He was dead keen to escape. He told me he was ready for anything, even killing if need be: he would get out, come what may. He had three thousand francs. When his eyes were washed with warm water he could see properly right away. I told him my plan for a break: he liked it, but he said that to catch the warders by surprise two of us would have to go out, or if possible three. We could undo the legs of the beds, and with an iron bed-leg apiece, we could knock them cold. According to him they wouldn’t believe you would fire even if you had a gun in your hands, and they might call the other screws on guard in the building Julot escaped from, not twenty yards away.

Third Exercise-Book First Break
Escape from the Hospital

That evening I put it to Dega straight, and then to Fernandez. Dega told me he did not believe in the plan and that he was thinking of paying a large sum of money, if necessary, to have his internment label changed. He asked me to write to Sierra, telling him this had been suggested, and asking whether it was on the cards. Chatal carried the note that same day, and brought back the answer. ‘Don’t pay anyone anything for having your internment changed. It’s decided in France, and no one, even the governor, can touch it. If things are hopeless in the hospital, you can try to get out the day after the Mana, the boat for the islands, has left.’

We should stay a week in the cellular block before going across to the islands where it might be easier to escape than from the hospital ward we had landed up in. In the same note Sierra told me that if I liked he’d send a freed convict to talk about getting me a boat ready behind the hospital. He was a character from Toulon called Jesus: the one who prepared Dr. Bougrat’s escape two years before. To see him I should have to go and be X-rayed in the special wing. It was inside the hospital walls, but the freed men could get in on a forged pass for an X-ray examination. He told me to take out my charger before I was looked at, or the doctor might look lower than my lungs and catch sight of it. I wrote to Sierra telling him to get Jesus to the X-ray and to fix things with Chatal so that I should be sent too. That very evening Sierra let me know that it was for nine o’clock the day after next.

The next day Dega asked permission to leave hospital, and so did Fernandez. The Mana had left that morning. They hoped to escape from the cells in the camp: I wished them good luck, but as for me I did not change my plan.

I saw Jesus. He was an old time-expired convict, as dry as a smoked haddock, and his sunburnt face was scarred with two hideous wounds. One of his eyes wept all the time when he looked at you. A wrong ’un’s face: a wrong ’un’s eye. I didn’t have much confidence in him and as things turned out I was dead right. We talked fast. ‘I can get a boat ready for you: it’ll hold four – five at the outside. A barrel of water, victuals, coffee, tobacco; three paddles, empty flour sacks and a needle and thread for you to make the mainsail and jib yourself; a compass, an axe, a knife, five bottles of tafia [the local rum]. Two thousand five hundred francs the lot. It’s the dark of the moon in three days. If it’s a deal, in four days time I’ll be there in the boat on the river every night for a week from eleven till three in the morning. After the first quarter I shan’t wait any longer. The boat will be exactly opposite the lower corner of the hospital wall. Guide yourself by the wall, because until you’re right on top of the boat you won’t be able to see it, not even at two yards.’ I didn’t trust him, but even so I said yes.

‘And the cash?’ said Jesus.

‘I’ll send it you by Sierra.’ We parted without shaking hands. Not so hot.

At three o’clock Chatal went off to the camp, taking the money to Sierra: two thousand five hundred francs. I thought: ‘I can afford this bet thanks to Galgani; but it’s an outside chance, all right. I hope to God he doesn’t drink the whole bleeding lot in tafia.’

Clousiot was overjoyed: he was full of confidence in himself, in me and in the plan. There was only one thing that worried him: although the Arab turnkey did come very often it was not every night that he came into the ward itself; and when he did it was rare that he came in very late. Another question: who could we have as a third? There was a Corsican belonging to the Nice underworld, a man called Biaggi. He had been in penal since 1929 and he was in this high-security ward because he had recently killed a guy – he was being held while that charge was investigated. Clousiot and I wondered whether we ought to put it up to him, and if so, when. While we were talking about this in an undertone an eighteen-year-old fairy came towards us, as pretty as a girl. Maturette was his name, and he had been condemned to death but reprieved because of his youth – seventeen when he murdered this taxi-driver. There were these two kids of sixteen and seventeen in the dock at the assizes, and instead of the one laying the blame on the other, each claimed that he had killed the man. But the taxi-driver had only one bullet in him. The kids’ attitude at the time of the trial had won them the convicts’ esteem.

Very much the young lady, Maturette came up to us and speaking in a girlish voice he asked us for a light. We gave him one; and more than that, I made him a present of four cigarettes and a box of matches. He thanked me with a languishing, come-on smile and we let him go. All at once Clousiot said, ‘Papi, we’re saved. The Arab’s going to come in as often as we like and when we like. It’s in the bag.’

‘How come?’

‘It’s simple. We’ll tell this little Maturette to make the Arab fall for him. Arabs love boys – everyone knows that. Once that’s done, there’s no great difficulty in getting him to come by night to have a swig at the boy. All the kid has to do is to go coy and say he’s afraid of being seen, for the Arab to come just when it suits us.’

‘Leave it to me.’

I went over to Maturette, who welcomed me with a winning smile. He thought he had aroused me with his first simper. Straight away I said, ‘You’ve got it wrong. Go to the lavatory.’ He went, and when we were there I said, ‘If you repeat a word of what I’m going to say. I’ll kill you. Listen: will you do so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so for money? How much? As a paid job for us, or do you want to go with us?’

‘I’d like to go with you. OK?’ Done. We shook hands.

He went to bed, and after a few words with Clousiot I went too. At eight o’clock that evening Maturette went and sat at the window. He didn’t have to call the Arab: he came all by himself, and they fell into a murmured conversation. At ten Maturette went to bed. We had been lying down, one eye open, since nine. The Arab came in, went his rounds and found a dead man. He knocked on the door and a little while later two stretcher-bearers came and took the corpse away. This dead man was going to be useful to us, because he would make the Arab’s inspections at any time of the night seem quite reasonable. The next day, advised by us, Maturette fixed to see the Arab at eleven. When the time came round the turnkey appeared, passed in front of the kid’s bed, pulled his foot to wake him up, and went off towards the lavatory. Maturette followed him. A quarter of an hour later the turnkey came out, went straight to the door and out through it. Just after that Maturette returned to his bed without speaking to us. To cut it short, the next day was the same, only at midnight. Everything was set up: the Arab would come exactly when the kid said.

On 27 November 1933 there were two bed-legs ready to be removed and used as clubs, and at four o’clock in the afternoon I was waiting for a note from Sierra. Chatal, the attendant, appeared: he had nothing in writing: he just said to me, ‘Francois Sierra told me to say Jesus is waiting for you at the place you know. Good luck.’

At eight that night Maturette said to the Arab, ‘Come after midnight, because that way we can stay longer together.’

The Arab said he’d come after midnight. Dead on midnight we were ready. The Arab came in at about a quarter past twelve; he went straight to Maturette’s bed, tweaked his foot and went on to the lavatory. Maturette went in after him. I wrenched the leg off my bed: it made a little noise as it lurched over. No sound from Clousiot’s. I was to stand behind the lavatory door and Clousiot was to walk towards it to attract the Arab’s attention. There was a twenty-minutes’ wait and then everything moved very fast. The Arab came out of the lavatory and, surprised at seeing Clousiot, said, ‘What are you doing here in the middle of the ward at this time of night? Get back to bed.’

At that moment I hit him on the back of the neck and he dropped without a sound. Quickly I put on his clothes and shoes: we dragged him under a bed, and before shoving him completely out of sight I gave him another crack on the nape. That put paid to him.

Not a single one of the eighty men in the ward had stirred. I went quickly towards the door, followed by Clousiot and Maturette, both of them in their shirts. I knocked. The warder opened. I brought my iron down on his head. The other, opposite him, dropped his rifle: he’d certainly been asleep. Before he could move I knocked him out. My two never uttered: Clousiot’s went ‘Ah!’ before he dropped. My two stayed there in their chairs, stunned. The third was stretched out on the floor. We held our breath. It seemed to us that everybody must have heard that ‘Ah!’ It had indeed been pretty loud; and yet nobody moved.

We didn’t heave them into the ward: we went straight off with the three rifles. Clousiot first, then the kid, then me: down the stairs, half-lit by a lantern. Clousiot had dropped his iron; I still had mine in my left hand, and in my right the rifle. At the bottom of the stairs, nothing. Ink-black night all round us. We had to look hard to make out the wall over on the river side. We hurried towards it. Once we were there, I bent down. Clousiot climbed up, straddled the top, hauled Maturette up and then me. We let ourselves drop into the darkness on the far side. Clousiot fell badly into a hole, twisting his foot. Maturette and I landed properly. We two got up: we had left the rifles before we went over. Clousiot tried to get to his feet but couldn’t: he said his leg was broken. I left Maturette with Clousiot and ran towards the corner of the wall, feeling it all the way with my hand. It was so dark that when I got to the end of the wall I didn’t know it, and with my hand reaching out into emptiness I fell flat on my face. Over on the river side I heard a voice saying, ‘Is that you?’

‘Yes. That Jesus?’

‘Yes.’ He flicked a match for half a second. I fixed his position, plunged in and swam to him. There were two of them in the boat.

‘You in first. Which are you?’

‘Papillon.’

‘Good.’

‘Jesus, we must pull upstream. My friend’s broken his leg jumping off the wall.’

‘Take this paddle, then, and shove.’

The three paddles dug into the water and the light boat shot across the hundred yards between us and the place where I supposed the others were – you could see nothing. I called, ‘Clousiot!’

‘For Christ’s sake shut up! Fatgut, flick your lighter.’ Sparks flashed: they saw it. Clousiot whistled between his teeth the way they do in Lyons; it’s a whistle that makes no noise at all but that you hear very clearly. You’d say it was a snake hissing. He kept up this whistling all the time, and it led us to him. Fatgut got out, took Clousiot in his arms and put him into the boat. Then Maturette got in and then Fatgut. There were five of us and the water came to within two inches of the gunwale.

‘Don’t anyone move without saying,’ said Jesus. ‘Papillon, stop paddling. Put the paddle across your knees. Fatgut, shove!’ And quickly, helped by the current, the boat plunged into the night.

Half a mile lower down, when we passed the prison, ill-lit by the current from a third-rate dynamo, we were in the middle of the river and the tide was tearing us along at an unbelievable rate. Fatgut had stopped paddling. Only Jesus had his out, with its handle tight against his thigh, just to keep the boat steady. He was not rowing at all, only steering.

Jesus said, ‘Now we can talk and have a smoke. I think we’ve brought it off. Are you certain you didn’t kill anyone?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Christ, Jesus, you’ve double-crossed me!’ said Fatgut. ‘You told me it was a harmless little break and no fuss, and now it turns out to be an internees’ break, from what I can gather.’

‘Yes, they’re internees. I didn’t feel like telling you, Fatgut, or you wouldn’t have helped me: and I needed someone. But why should you worry? If we’re shopped I’ll take it all on myself.’

‘That’s the right way of looking at it, Jesus. I don’t want to risk my head for the hundred francs you’ve paid me; nor a lifer if there’s anyone wounded.’

I said, ‘Fatgut, I’ll give you a present of a thousand francs between you.’

‘OK, then, brother. That sounds like a square deal to me. Thanks, because we starve to death there in the village. It’s worse being outside than in. If you’re in, at least you can fill your belly every day; and they find you in clothes.’

‘It doesn’t hurt you too much, mate?’ said Jesus to Clousiot.

‘It’s all right,’ said Clousiot. ‘But what are we going to do, Papillon, with my leg broken?’

‘We’ll see. Where we going, Jesus?’

‘I’m going to hide you in a creek twenty miles from the mouth of the river. There you can lie up for a week and let the worst of the warders’ and trackers’ hunt blow over. You must give them the idea you went right down the Maroni and out to sea this very night. The trackers go in boats with no motor, and they’re the most dangerous. If they’re on the watch, it can be fatal to you to talk or cough or have a fire. As for the screws, they’re in motor-boats that are too big to go up the creeks – they’d run aground.’

The darkness was lessening. For a long time we searched for a landmark known only to Jesus, and it was almost four o’clock before we found it: then we literally went right into the bush. The boat flattened the small undergrowth, which straightened up again behind us, making a very thick protective curtain. You had to be a wizard to know whether there was enough water to float a boat. We went in, pushing aside the branches that barred our passage and thrusting into the bush for more than an hour. All at once we were there, in a kind of canal, and we stopped. There was clean grass on the bank; and now, at six o’clock, the light did not penetrate the leaves of the huge trees. Beneath this impressive roof there were the sounds of hundreds of creatures quite unknown to us. Jesus said, ‘Here is where you have to wait for a week. I’ll come on the seventh day and bring you food.’ From under the thick vegetation he pulled a very small canoe, about six feet long. Two paddles in it. This was the craft he was going back to Saint-Laurent in, on the flood-tide.

Now we took care of Clousiot, who was lying there on the bank. He was still in his shirt, so his legs were bare. We trimmed dry branches with the axe, making splints of them. Fatgut heaved on his foot; Clousiot sweated hard and then at a given moment he cried, ‘Stop! It hurts less in this position, so the bone must be in its right place.’ We put on the splints and tied them with new hemp cord from the boat. His pain was eased. Jesus had bought four pairs of trousers, four shirts and four relégués’ woollen lumber-jackets. Maturette and Clousiot put them on: I stayed in the Arab’s clothes. We had a tot of rum. This was the second bottle since we left – it warmed us, which was a good thing. The mosquitoes did not give us a moment’s peace: we had to sacrifice a packet of tobacco. We put it to soak in a calabash and smeared the nicotine-juice over our faces, hands and feet. The woollen jackets were splendid; they kept us warm in spite of this penetrating damp.

Fatgut said, ‘We’re off. What about this thousand francs you promised?’ I went behind a bush and came back with a brand-new thousand note.

‘Be seeing you. Don’t stir from here for eight days,’ said Jesus. ‘We’ll come on the seventh. The eighth you can get out to sea. Meanwhile make the mainsail and jib; put the boat to rights, everything in its place. Fix the pintle – the rudder’s not shipped. If we don’t come within ten days, it means we’ve been arrested in the village. As there was an attack on a warder, which adds some spice to the break, there will surely be the most God-almighty bleeding rampage about it all.’

Clousiot had told us he didn’t leave the rifle at the bottom of the wall. He had flung it over, and the water was so close (which he hadn’t known) that it must certainly have gone into the river. Jesus said that was fine, because if it was not found the trackers were going to think we were armed. And since they were the really dangerous ones, we should therefore have nothing to be afraid of. Because they only had a revolver and a jungle-knife and if they thought we had rifles, they would never risk it.

Good-bye. Good-bye. If we were found and we had to leave the boat, we should go up the little stream as far as the dry bush and then steer by compass, always keeping north. In two or three days’ march we were likely to come across the death-camp called Charvin. There we should have to pay someone to tell Jesus we were in such and such a place. The two old lags pushed off. A few moments later their canoe had vanished: we neither heard nor saw anything more at all.

Daylight comes into the bush in a very special way. You would think you were in an arcade whose top caught the sun and never let a single ray make its way down to the bottom. It began to grow hot. And now here we were, Maturette, Clousiot and me, quite alone. Our first reaction was to laugh – the whole thing had run on oiled wheels. The only hitch was Clousiot’s broken leg, though he said himself that now it was held between flat pieces of wood, it was all right. We could brew the coffee straight away. This we did very quickly, making a fire and drinking a great mug of black coffee apiece, sweetened with brown sugar. It was marvellous. We had used ourselves up so much since the evening before that we hadn’t the energy to look at the things or to inspect the boat. We’d see to all that later. We were free, free, free. Exactly thirty-seven days had passed since I reached Guiana. If we brought this break off, my lifer wouldn’t have been a very long one. I said aloud, ‘Monsieur le President, how many years does penal servitude for life last in France?’ and I burst out laughing. So did Maturette – he had a lifer too. Clousiot said, ‘don’t crow too soon. Colombia’s a long way off, and this hollowed-out tree-trunk doesn’t seem to me much of a thing to go to sea in.’

I did not reply, because to tell the truth until the last moment I had thought it was just the canoe meant to take us to the real boat, the boat for the sea voyage. When I found I was wrong, I did not like to say anything, so as not to discourage my friends in the first place, and in the second not to give Jesus the idea that I didn’t know what kind of boats were usually used for a break – he seemed to think it perfectly natural.

We spent the first day talking and getting to know a little about the bush – it was completely strange to us. Monkeys and squirrels of some kind flung themselves about overhead in the most astonishing way. A herd of peccaries came down to drink: they are a kind of small wild pig. There were at least two thousand of them. They plunged into the creek and swam about, tearing off the hanging roots. An alligator emerged from God knows where and caught one pig by the foot: it started to shriek and squeal like a steam-engine, and all the others rushed at the alligator, clambering on to it and trying to bite the corners of its enormous mouth. At every blow of the alligator’s tail a pig flew into the air, one to the left, the next to the right. One pig was stunned and it floated there, belly up. Instantly its companions ate it. The creek was red with blood. This scene lasted twenty minutes and then the alligator escaped into the water. We never saw it again.

We slept well, and in the morning we made our coffee. I took off my jacket so as to wash with a big bar of common soap we found in the boat. Using my scalpel, Maturette shaved me, more or less, and then he shaved Clousiot. He himself had no beard. When I picked up my jacket to put it on again, a huge, hairy, blackish-purple spider fell out. Its hairs were very long and each ended in a little shining ball. The monstrous thing must have weighed at least a pound: I squashed it, feeling disgusted. We took everything out of the boat, including the little water-barrel. The water was violet, and it seemed to me Jesus had put in too much permanganate to make it keep. There were well-corked bottles with matches and strikers. The compass was only a schoolboy’s job – it just gave north, south, east and west: no graduations. The mast was no more than eight feet long, so we sewed the flour-sacks into a lug-sail with a border of rope to strengthen it. And I made a little triangular jib to help make the boat lie close.

When we stepped the mast I found the boat’s bottom was not sound: the slot for the mast was eaten away and badly worn. When I put in the spikes for the hinges that were to hold the rudder, they went in as if the hull were butter. The boat was rotten. That sod Jesus was sending us to our death. Very unwittingly I explained all this to the others: I had no right to hide it from them. What were we going to do about it? Make Jesus find us a sounder boat when he came, that’s what. We’d take his weapons from him, and carrying a knife and the axe I’d go to the village with him and look for another boat. It was a great risk to take; but not so great as putting to sea in a coffin. The stores were all right: there was a wicker-covered bottle of oil and some tins full of manioc flour. We could go a long way on that.

That morning we saw a wonderfully strange sight: a troop of grey-faced monkeys had a battle with monkeys whose faces were black and woolly. During the struggle Maturette came in for a piece of wood on the head that gave him a lump the size of a walnut.

Now we had been there five days and four nights. Last night rain fell in torrents. We sheltered ourselves under wild banana leaves. Their shiny sides poured with water, but we were not wetted at all, only our feet. This morning, as we drank our coffee, I thought about Jesus’s wickedness. Taking advantage of our lack of experience to palm off this rotting boat on us! Just to save five hundred or a thousand francs he was sending three men to certain death. I wondered whether I shouldn’t kill him once I had forced him to get us another boat.

Suddenly we were startled by a noise like jays, a shrieking so harsh and unpleasant that I told Maturette to take the jungle-knife and go and see what was up. Five minutes later he came back, beckoning. I followed him and we reached a spot about a hundred and fifty yards from the boat: hanging there I saw a great pheasant or wild-fowl, twice the size of a cock. It was caught in a noose and it was hanging by its foot from a branch. With one blow of the jungle-knife I took off its head, to stop its ghastly shrieks. I felt its weight: it must have been at least ten pounds. It had spurs like a cock. We decided to eat it, but while we were thinking it over, it occurred to us that somebody must have set that snare and that there might be others. We went to have a look. When we were back there we found something very odd – a positive fence or wall about a foot high, made of woven leaves and creepers, some ten yards from the creek. This barrier ran parallel with the water. Every now and then there was a gap, and in this gap, hidden by twigs, the end of a noose of brass wire fixed to a bent-over whippy branch. I saw at once that the creature must come up against this hedge and then go along it, trying to get past. On finding the gap, it would pass through, but its feet would catch in the wire and spring the branch. Then there it would be, hanging in the air until the owner of the snares came to take it.

This discovery worried us badly. The hedge seemed to be well kept, so it wasn’t old: and we were in danger of being found. We mustn’t light a fire in the daytime: but at night the hunter wouldn’t come. We decided to take it in turns to keep watch in the direction of the traps. We hid the boat under branches and all the stores in the bush.

The next day at ten o’clock I was on guard. For supper we had eaten that pheasant or cock or whatever it was. The soup had done us an enormous amount of good, and although the meat was only boiled it was still delicious. We had each eaten two bowls full. So I was on guard: but I was so taken up with the goings-on of the huge black manioc ants, each carrying a piece of leaf to the enormous ant-hill, that I forgot to keep watch. These ants were close on an inch long and they stood high on their legs. Each one was carrying this enormous piece of leaf. I followed them to the plant they were stripping and I discovered the whole thing was thoroughly organized. First there were the cutters, who did nothing but get the pieces ready: they were working away on a gigantic leaf something like the ones on a banana palm, very skilfully and very quickly cutting off pieces all the same size, which they dropped to the ground. Down below there were ants of the same sort but slightly different. These ones had a grey stripe on the side of their jaws: and they stood in a half circle, supervising the carriers. The carriers came filing in from the right and they went off towards the left in the direction of the ant-hill. They snatched up their loads before getting into line, but sometimes, what with their hurry in trying to load and to get into position, there was a jam. Then the police-ants would step in and shove the workers into their proper places. I couldn’t understand the crime one worker had committed, but she was brought out of the ranks and one police-ant bit off her head while another divided her body in two in the middle. The police-ants stopped two workers; they put down their loads, scratched a hole, buried the three parts of the ant – head, chest, bottom piece-and covered them over with earth.

Pigeon Island

I was so taken up with watching these creatures and following the soldiers to see whether their policing went as far as the entrance to the ant-hill, that I was taken utterly by surprise when a voice said, ‘Don’t move or you’re a dead man. Turn round.’

It was a man bare from the waist up, wearing khaki shorts and long red leather boots. He had a double-barrelled gun in his hands. Medium-sized and thickset: sunburnt. He was bald and his eyes and nose were covered with a bright blue tattooed mask. And in the middle of his forehead there was a tattooed black-beetle.

‘You armed?’

‘No.’

‘Alone?’

‘No.’

‘How many of you are there?’

‘Three.’

‘Take me to your friends.’

‘I wouldn’t like to do that: one has a rifle, and I wouldn’t like to get you killed before I know what you mean to do.’

‘Ah? Don’t you move an inch, then; and just you talk quiet. You’re the three guys that escaped from the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which is Papillon?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Well then, I can tell you you’ve stirred things up good and proper in the village, with your escape! Half the time-expired men are under arrest at the gendarmerie.’ He came towards me, and lowering his gun he stretched out his hand. ‘I’m the Masked Breton,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of me?’

‘No, but I can see you’re not a tracker.’

‘You’re right there. I set traps round about here to catch hoccos. A jaguar must have eaten one for me, unless it was you guys.’

‘It was us.’

‘You want some coffee?’ He had a thermos in a knapsack: he gave me a little and drank some himself. I said, ‘Come and see my friends.’ He came and sat down with us. He was amused at my having pulled the rifle trick with him. He said, ‘I fell for it, particularly as everyone knows you left carrying a gun, and there’s no tracker who’ll go after you.’

He told us he had been in Guiana twenty years and that he’d been free these last five. He was forty-five. Because of the silly caper of having had that mask tattooed on his face, life in France didn’t mean anything to him. He worshipped the bush and lived off it entirely – snakes’ and jaguars’ skins, butterfly collections, and above all catching live hoccos, the bird we’d eaten. He could sell them for two hundred or two hundred and fifty francs. I suggested paying for it, but he refused indignantly. This is what he told us: ‘The bird is a sort of wild bush cock. Of course, it’s never so much as seen an ordinary hen or a cock or a human being. Well, I catch one, I take it to the village and I sell it to someone who has a hen-run – they’re always in demand. Right. You don’t have to clip his wings, you don’t have to do anything at all: at nightfall you put him into the henhouse and when you open the door in the morning there he is, standing by, looking like he was counting the cocks and hens as they come out. He comes out after them, and although he eats alongside of them, all the time he’s watching – he looks up, he looks sideways and he looks into the bushes all round. There’s no watchdog to touch him. In the evening he stands there at the door and although no one can tell how, he knows if there’s a hen or two missing, and he goes and finds them. And whether it’s a cock or whether it’s a hen, he drives them in, pecking them like mad to teach them to keep an eye on the clock. He kills rats, snakes, shrews, spiders and centipedes; and a bird of prey has hardly appeared in the sky before he sends everyone off to hide in the grass while he stands there defying it. He never quits the hen-run for a moment.’ And this was the wonderful bird we had eaten like any common barnyard cock.

The Masked Breton told us that Jesus, Fatgut and some thirty other freed men were in prison in the Saint-Laurent gendarmerie, being investigated to see whether any of them could be recognized as having been seen prowling about the building we escaped from. The Arab was in the black-hole of the gendarmerie. He was in solitary, accused of having helped us. The two blows that knocked him out had left no mark, whereas each of the screws had a little lump on the head. ‘For my part, I wasn’t interfered with at all, because everybody knows I never have anything to do with preparing a break.’ He told us Jesus was a sod. When I spoke to him about the boat he asked to see it. He’d scarcely caught sight of it before he cried, ‘But the bastard was sending you to your death! This canoe could never live for an hour in the sea. The first wave of any size, and it’d split in two as it came down. Don’t go off in that thing – it’d be suicide.’

‘What can we do, then?’

‘Got any money?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll tell you what to do: and what’s more, I’ll help you. You deserve it. You mustn’t go anywhere near the village – not at any price. To get hold of a decent boat you have to go to Pigeon Island. There are about two hundred lepers there. There’s no warder, and no healthy man ever goes, not even the doctor. At eight o’clock every day a boat takes food for twenty-four hours: uncooked food. A hospital orderly hands over a case of medicine to the two attendants, lepers themselves, who look after the patients. No one sets foot on the island, whether he’s warder, tracker or priest. The lepers live in little straw huts they make themselves. They have a central building where they meet. They raise hens and ducks, and that helps them out with their rations. Officially they aren’t allowed to sell anything off the island, so they have an illicit trade with Saint-Laurent, Saint-Jean and the Chinese of Albina in Dutch Guiana. They’re all dangerous murderers. They don’t often kill one another but they do a fair amount of villainy when they get out of the island on the quiet – they go back and hide there when it’s over. They have some boats stolen from the nearby village for these excursions. Possessing a boat is the worst crime they can commit. The warders fire on any canoe that comes or goes from Pigeon Island. So the lepers sink their boats, filling them with stones: when they need one they dive down, take out the stones, and the boat comes up. There are all kinds on the island, every colour and nation and from every part of France. What it comes to is this – your canoe is only any use to you on the Maroni, and without much in it, at that. To get out to sea, you’ve got to find another boat, and the best place for that is Pigeon Island.’

‘How are we to set about it?’

‘This is how. I’ll come with you up the river until we’re in sight of the island. You wouldn’t find it, or at any rate you might go wrong. It’s about a hundred miles from the mouth, so you have to go upstream again. It’s about thirty miles from Saint-Laurent. I’ll guide you in as close as I can and then I’ll get into my canoe – we’ll tow it behind. Then, once on the island, it’s all up to you.’

‘Why won’t you come on to the island with us?’

‘Ma Doué,’ said the Breton, ‘I just set foot on the landing stage one day, the jetty where the official boats come in. Just once. It was in full daylight, but even so, what I saw was quite enough for me. No, Papi: I’ll never set foot on that island again in my life. Anyhow, I’d never be able to hide my disgust at being near them, talking to them, dealing with them. I’d do more harm than good.’

‘When do we go?’

‘At nightfall.’

‘What’s the time now, Breton?’

‘Three o’clock.’

‘OK. I’ll get a little sleep.’

‘No. You’ve got to load everything properly aboard your canoe.’

‘Nothing of the sort. I’ll go with the empty canoe and then come back for Clousiot. He can stay here with the things.’

‘Impossible. You’d never be able to find the place again, even in the middle of the day. And you must never, never be on the river in daylight. The search for you isn’t over, so don’t think that. The river is still very dangerous.’

Evening came. He brought his canoe and we tied it behind ours. Clousiot lay next to the Breton, who took the steering paddle, and then came Maturette, and then me in front. We made our slow way out of the creek and when we came into the river, night was just about to come down. Over towards the sea a huge brownish-red sun lit up the horizon. The countless fireworks of an enormous display fought to be the most brilliant, redder than the red, yellower than the yellow, more fantastically striped where the colours were mixed. Ten miles away, we could distinctly make out the estuary of the splendid river as it ran gleaming pink and silver into the sea.

The Breton said, ‘It’s the last of the ebb. In an hour we should feel the flood-tide: we’ll make use of it to run up the Maroni: the current will take us up without any effort, and we’ll reach the island pretty soon.’ The darkness came down in a single sweep.

‘Give way,’ said the Breton. ‘Paddle hard and get into the middle of the stream. Don’t smoke.’ The paddles dug into the water and we moved quite fast across the current. Shoo, shoo, shoo. The Breton and I kept stroke beautifully; Maturette did his best. The nearer we got to the middle of the river the more we felt the thrust of the tide. We slid on rapidly, and every half hour we felt the difference. The tide grew in strength, pushing us faster and faster. Six hours later we were very close to the island and heading straight for it – a great patch of darkness almost in the middle of the river, slightly to the right. ‘That’s it,’ said the Breton in a low voice. The night was not very dark, but it would have been almost impossible to see us from any distance because of the mist over the face of the water. We came closer. When the outline of the rocks was clearer, the Breton got into his canoe and cast off quickly, just murmuring, ‘Good luck, you guys.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Think nothing of it.’

As the boat no longer had the Breton steering it, we went straight for the island, drifting sideways. I tried to straighten out, turning it right round, but I made a mess of it and the current thrust us deep into the vegetation overhanging the water. We came in with such force, in spite of my braking with my paddle, that if we had hit a rock instead of leaves and branches the canoe would have been smashed and everything lost – stores, food, the lot. Maturette jumped into the water and heaved; we slid under a huge clump of bushes. He pulled and pulled and we tied the boat to a branch. We had a shot of rum and then I climbed the bank alone, leaving my two friends in the boat.

I went along with the compass in my hand, breaking several branches as I went, tying on scraps of flour-sack that I had put aside before we left. I saw a lighter patch in the darkness and then all at once I made out three huts and heard the sound of voices. I went forward, and as I had no idea how to make myself known, I decided to let them find me. I lit a cigarette. The moment the match sparked a little dog rushed out, barking and jumping up to bite my legs. ‘Christ, I hope it’s not a leper,’ I thought. ‘Don’t be a fool: dogs don’t get leprosy.’

‘Who’s there? Who is it? Marcel, is that you?’

‘It’s a guy on the run.’

‘What are you doing here? Trying to knock something off? Do you think we’ve got anything to spare?’

‘No. I want help.’

‘For free or for cash?’

‘You shut your bloody trap, La Chouette.’ Four shadows came out of the hut. ‘Come forward slowly, brother. I’ll bet any money you’re the character with the rifle. If you’ve got it with you, put it down: there’s nothing to be afraid of here.’

‘Yes, that’s me. But the rifle’s not here.’ I walked forward; I was close to them; it was dark and I could not make out their faces. Like a fool I held out my hand: nobody took it. Too late I grasped that this was the wrong move here – they didn’t want to infect me.

‘Let’s go into the hut,’ said La Chouette. It was lit by an oil lamp standing on the table. ‘Sit down.’

I took a straw chair without a back. La Chouette lit three other lamps and set one on the table just in front of me. The wick gave off a sickening reek – the smell of coconut-oil. I sat there: the five others stood. I couldn’t make out their faces. Mine was lit up by the lamp, which was what they had wanted. The voice that had told La Chouette to shut up said, ‘L’Anguille, go to the house and ask if they want us to take him there. Come back with the answer quick, particularly if Toussaint says yes. We can’t give you anything to drink here, mate, unless you’d like a raw egg.’ He pushed a plaited basket full of eggs towards me.

‘No, thanks.’

Very close to me on my right one of them sat down and it was then that I saw my first leper’s face. It was horrible and I made an effort not to turn away or show what I felt. His nose, flesh and bone, was entirely eaten away: a hole right in the middle of his face. I mean a hole, not two. Just one hole, as big as a two-franc piece. On the right-hand side his lower lip was eaten away, and three very long yellow teeth showed in the shrunken gum: you could see them go into the naked bone of the upper jaw. Only one ear. He put his bandaged hand on the table. It was his right hand. In the two fingers that he still had on the other he held a long, fat cigar: he must certainly have rolled it himself from a half-cured leaf, for it was greenish. He had an eyelid only on his left eye: the right had none, and a deep wound ran upwards from the eye into his thick grey hair. In a hoarse voice he said, ‘We’ll help you, mate: you mustn’t stay in Guiana long enough to get the way I am. I don’t want that.’

‘Thanks.’

‘They call me Jean sans Peur: I’m from Paris. I was better looking, healthier and stronger than you when I reached the settlement. Ten years, and now look at me.’

‘Don’t they give you any treatment?’

‘Yes, they do. I’ve been better since I started chaulmoogra oil injections. Look.’ He turned his head and showed me the left side. ‘It’s drying up here.’

I had an overwhelming feeling of pity and to show my friendliness I put my hand up towards his left cheek. He started back and said, ‘Thanks for meaning to touch me. But don’t ever touch a sick man, and don’t eat or drink out of his bowl.’ This was still the only leper’s face I had seen – the only one who had the courage to bear my looking at him.

‘Where’s this character you’re talking about?’ The shadow of a man only just bigger than a dwarf appeared in the doorway. ‘Toussaint and the others want to see him. Bring him over.’

Jean sans Peur stood up and said, ‘Follow me.’ We all went out into the darkness, four or five in front, me next to Jean sans Peur, the rest behind. In three minutes we reached a broad open place, a sort of square, which was lit by a scrap of moon. This was the flat topmost point of the island. A house in the middle. Light coming out of two windows. About twenty men waiting for us in front of the door: we went towards them. As we reached the door they stood aside to let us go through. It was a room some thirty feet long and twelve wide with a log fire burning in a kind of fireplace made of four huge stones all the same height. The place was lit by two big hurricane lamps. An ageless man with a white face sat there on a stool. Five or six others on a bench behind him. He had black eyes and he said to me. ‘I’m Toussaint the Corsican: and you must be Papillon.’

‘Yes.’

‘News travels fast in the settlement; as fast as you move yourself. Where have you put the rifle?’

‘We tossed it into the river.’

‘Where?’

‘Opposite the hospital wall, just where we jumped.’

‘So it could be got at?’

‘I think so; the water’s not deep there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We had to get in to carry my wounded friend into the boat.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘A broken leg.’

‘What have you done about it?’

‘I’ve split branches down the middle and put a kind of cage round his leg.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the canoe.’

‘You said you’d come for help. What sort of help?’

‘A boat.’

‘You want us to let you have a boat?’

‘Yes. I’ve got money to pay for it.’

‘OK. I’ll sell you mine. It’s a splendid boat, quite new – I stole it only last week in Albina. Boat? It’s not a boat: it’s a liner. There’s only one thing it lacks, and that’s a keel. It hasn’t got one: but we’ll put one on for you in a couple of hours. There’s everything there – a rudder and its tiller, a thirteen-foot iron-wood mast and a brand-new canvas sail. What’ll you give me?’

‘You name a price. I don’t know the value of things here.’

‘Three thousand francs, if you can pay it: if not, go and fetch the rifle tomorrow night and we’ll do a swap.’

‘No. I’d rather pay.’

‘OK, it’s a deal. La Puce, let’s have some coffee.’

La Puce, the near-dwarf, who had come for me, went to a plank fixed to the wall over the fire, took down a mess-tin shining with cleanliness and newness, poured coffee into it from a bottle and set it on the fire. After a while he took it off, poured coffee into various mugs standing by the stones for Toussaint to pass to the men behind him, and gave me the mess-tin, saying ‘Don’t be afraid of drinking. This one’s for visitors only. No sick man ever uses it.’

I took the bowl, drank, and then rested it on my knee. As I did so I noticed a finger sticking to its side. I was beginning to grasp the situation when La Puce said, ‘Hell, I’ve lost another finger. Where the devil can it have got to?’

‘Here it is,’ I said, showing him the tin. He picked off the finger, threw it in the fire and gave me back the bowl.

‘It’s all right to drink,’ he said, ‘because I’ve only got dry leprosy. I come to pieces spare part by spare part, but I don’t rot – I’m not catching.’

I smelt burning meat. I thought, ‘That must be the finger.’

Toussaint said, ‘You’ll have to spend the whole day here until the evening ebb. You must go and tell your friends. Carry the one with the broken leg up to a hut, empty the canoe and sink it. There’s no one here can give you a hand – you know why, of course.’

I hurried back to the others. We lifted Clousiot out and then carried him to a hut. An hour later everything was out of the canoe and carefully arranged on the ground. La Puce asked for the canoe and a paddle as a present. I gave it to him and he went off to sink it in a place he knew. The night passed quickly. We were all three of us in the hut, lying on new blankets sent by Toussaint. They reached us still wrapped in their strong backing paper. Stretched out there at my ease. I told Clousiot and Maturette the details of what had happened since I went ashore and about the deal I had made with Toussaint. Then, without thinking, Clousiot said a stupid thing. ‘So the break’s costing six thousand five hundred. I’ll give you half, Papillon – I mean the three thousand francs that I have.’

‘We don’t want to muck about with accounts like a bunch of bank-clerks. So long as I’ve got the cash, I pay. After that – well, we’ll see.’

None of the lepers came into the hut. Day broke, and Toussaint appeared. ‘Good morning. You can go out without worrying. No one can come on you unexpectedly here. Up a coconut-palm on the top of the island there’s a guy watching to see if there are any screws’ boats on the river. There’s none in sight. So long as that bit of white cloth is up there, it means no boats. If he sees anything he’ll come down and say. You can pick papayas yourselves and eat them, if you like.’

I said, ‘Toussaint, what about the keel?’

‘We’ll make it out of a plank from the infirmary door. That’s heavy snake-wood. Two planks will do the job. We took advantage of the night to haul the boat up to the top. Come and have a look.’ We went. It was a splendid sixteen-foot boat, quite new, with two thwarts – one had a hole for the mast. It was so heavy that Maturette and I had a job turning it over. The sail and rigging were brand-new. There were rings in the sides to lash things to, such as the water-barrel. We set to work. By noon a keel, deepening as it ran aft, was firmly fixed with long screws and the four spikes I had with me.

Standing there in a ring, the lepers silently watched us work. Toussaint told us how to set about it and we followed his instructions. Toussaint’s face looked natural enough – no bad places on it. But when he spoke you noticed that only one half of his face moved, the left half. He told me that; and he also told me he had dry leprosy. His chest and his right arm were paralysed too, and he was expecting his right leg to go presently. His right eye was as set as one made of glass: it could see, but not move. I won’t give any of the lepers’ names. Maybe those who knew or loved them were never told the hideous way they rotted alive.

As I worked I talked to Toussaint. No one else said a word. Except once, when I was just going to pick up some hinges they had wrenched off a piece of furniture in the infirmary to strengthen the hold of the keel: one said, ‘Don’t take them yet. Leave them there. I cut myself getting one off, and although I wiped it there’s still a little blood.’ Another leper poured rum over the hinge and lit it twice. ‘Now you can use it,’ he said.

During our work Toussaint said to one of the lepers, ‘You’ve escaped a good many times; tell Papillon just what he ought to do, since none of these three has ever made a break.’

Straight away the leper began, ‘The ebb will start very early this afternoon. The tide’ll change at three. By nightfall, about six o’clock, you’ll have a very strong run that’ll take you to about sixty miles from the mouth of the river in less than three hours. When you have to pull in, it’ll be about nine. You must tie up good and solid to a tree in the bush during the six hours of flood: that brings you to three in the morning. Don’t set off then, though, because the ebb doesn’t run fast enough. Get out into the middle at say half past four. You’ll have an hour and a half to cover the thirty odd miles before sunrise. Everything depends on that hour and a half. At six o’clock, when the sun comes up, you have to be out at sea. Even if the screws do see you, they can’t follow, because they’d reach the bar at the mouth of the river just as the flood begins. They can’t get over it, and you’ll already be across. You’ve got to have that lead of half a mile when they see you – it’s life or death. There’s only one sail here. What did you have on the canoe?’

‘Mainsail and jib.’

‘This is a heavy boat: it’ll stand two jibs – a staysail and an outer jib to keep her bows well up. Go out of the river with everything set. There are always heavy seas at the mouth there, and you want to take them head on. Make your friends lie down in the bottom to keep her steady and get a good grip on the tiller. Don’t tie the sheet to your leg, but pass it through that fairlead and hold it with a turn round your wrist. If you see that the wind and a heavy sea are going to lay you right over, let everything go and you’ll straighten up right away. If that happens, don’t you stop, but let the mainsail spill the wind and carry right on with the jib and staysail full. When you’re out in the blue water you’ll have time enough to put it all to rights – not before that. Do you know your course?’

‘No. All I know is that Venezuela and Colombia lie north-west.’

‘That’s right; but take care not to be forced back on shore. Dutch Guiana, on the other side of the river, hands escaped men back, and so does British Guiana. Trinidad doesn’t, but they make you leave in a fortnight. Venezuela returns you, after you’ve worked on the roads for a year or two.’

I listened as hard as I could. He told me he went off from time to time, but since he was a leper everybody sent him away at once. He admitted he had never been farther than Georgetown, in British Guiana. His leprosy could only be seen on his feet, which had lost all their toes. He was barefoot. Toussaint told me to repeat all the advice I had been given, and I did so without making a mistake. At this point Jean sans Peur said, ‘How long ought he to sail out to sea?’

I answered first, ‘I’ll steer north-north-east for three days. Reckoning the leeway that’ll make dead north. Then the fourth day I’ll head north-west, which will come to true west.’

‘That’s right,’ said the leper. ‘Last time I only stood out two days, so I ended up in British Guiana. With three days standing on, you’ll go north past Trinidad or Barbados, and then you go right by Venezuela without noticing it and land up in Curaçao or Colombia.’

Jean sans Peur said, ‘Toussaint, what did you sell your boat for?’

‘Three thousand,’ said Toussaint. ‘Was that dear?’

‘No, that wasn’t why I asked. Just to know, that’s all. Can you pay, Papillon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you have any money left?’

‘No. That’s all we’ve got – exactly the three thousand my friend Clousiot has on him.’

‘Toussaint,’ said Jean sans Peur, ‘I’ll let you have my revolver. I’d like to help these guys. What’ll you give me for it?’

‘A thousand francs,’ said Toussaint. ‘I’d like to help them too.’

‘Thanks for everything,’ said Maturette, looking at Jean sans Peur.

‘Thanks,’ said Clousiot.

Now I was ashamed of having lied and I said, ‘No. I can’t take it. There’s no reason why you should give us anything.’

He looked at me and said, ‘Yes, there is a reason all right. Three thousand francs is a lot of money; but even so, Toussaint’s dropping two thousand at least on the deal, because it’s a hell of a good boat he’s letting you have. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t do something for you too.’

And then something very moving happened. La Chouette put a hat on the ground and the lepers began throwing notes or coins into it. Lepers appeared from everywhere, and every one of them put something in. I was overcome with shame. Yet it just wasn’t possible to say I still had money left. Christ, what was I to do? Here was this great-hearted conduct and I was behaving like a shit. I said, ‘Please, please don’t sacrifice all this.’ A coal-black Negro, terribly mutilated – two stumps for hands, no fingers at all – said, ‘We don’t use the money for living. Don’t be ashamed to take it. We only use it for gambling or for stuffing the leper-women who come over from Albina now and then.’ What he said was a relief to me and it stopped me confessing I still had some money.

The lepers had boiled two hundred eggs. They brought them in a wooden box with a red cross on it. It was the box they had had that morning with the day’s medicines. They also brought two live turtles weighing at least half a hundredweight each, carefully laid on their backs, tobacco in leaves and two bottles full of matches and strikers; a sack of at least a hundredweight of rice, two bags of charcoal; the Primus from the infirmary and a wicker bottle of paraffin. The whole community, all these terribly unfortunate men, felt for us; they all wanted to help us succeed. Anyone would have said this was their escape rather than ours. We hauled the boat down near to the place where we had landed. They counted the money in the hat: eight hundred and ten francs. I only had to give Toussaint one thousand two hundred. Clousiot passed me his charger. I opened it there in front of everybody. It held a thousand-franc note and four five hundreds. I gave Toussaint one thousand five hundred. He gave me three hundred change and then he said, ‘Here. Take the revolver – it’s a present. You’re staking everything you’ve got, and it mustn’t go wrong at the last moment just for want of a weapon. I hope you won’t have to use it.’

I didn’t know how to say thank you, to Toussaint first and then to all the others. The medical orderly had put up a little tin with cotton-wool, alcohol, aspirin, bandages, iodine, a pair of scissors and some sticking-plaster. Another leper brought two slim, well-planed pieces of wood and two strips of antiseptic binding still in its packet, perfectly new. They were a present so that I could change Clousiot’s splints.

About five it began to rain. Jean sans Peur said, ‘You’re lucky. There’s no danger of your being seen, so you can get off right away and gain at least half an hour. That way you’ll be nearer the mouth when you start again at half-past four in the morning.’

‘How shall I know the time?’ I asked him.

‘The tide’ll tell you, coming in or out.’

We launched the boat. It was not like the canoe at all. Even with us and all our things aboard, the gunwale was a good eighteen inches from the water. The mast, wrapped in the sail, lay flat fore and aft, because we were not to put it up until we were about to run out of the river. We shipped the rudder, with its safety-bar and tiller, and put a pad of creepers for me to sit on. We made a comfortable place in the bottom of the boat with the blankets for Clousiot, who had not wanted to have his bandages changed. He lay at my feet, between me and the water-barrel. Maturette was in the bottom too, but up forward. Straight away I had a feeling of safety and solidity that I had never had in the canoe.

It was still raining. I was to go down the middle of the river, but rather to the left, over on the Dutch side. Jean sans Peur said, ‘Good-bye. Push off quick.’

‘Good luck,’ said Toussaint, and he gave the boat a great shove with his foot.

‘Thanks, Toussaint. Thanks, Jean. Thanks, everybody, thanks a thousand times over!’ And we vanished at great speed, swept along by the ebb-tide that had begun quite two and a half hours ago and that was now running at an unbelievable pace.

It rained steadily: we couldn’t see ten yards in front of us. There were two little islands lower down, so Maturette leant out over the bows, staring ahead so we shouldn’t run on their rocks. Night fell. For a moment we were half caught in the branches of a big tree that was going down the river with us, but fortunately not quite so fast. We quickly got free and carried on at something like twenty miles an hour. We smoked: we drank rum. The lepers had given us half a dozen of those straw-covered Chianti bottles, but filled with tafia. It was odd, but not one of us mentioned the hideous mutilations we had seen among the lepers. The only thing we talked about was their kindness, their generosity, their straightness and our good luck in having met the Masked Breton, who took us to Pigeon Island. It rained harder and harder and I was wet through: but those woollen jackets were such good quality they kept you warm even when they were soaked. We were not cold. The only thing was my hand on the tiller – the rain made it go stiff.

‘We’re running at more than twenty-five miles an hour now,’ said Maturette, ‘How long do you think we’ve been gone for?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Clousiot. ‘Just a moment. Three and a quarter hours.’

‘Are you crazy, man? How can you possibly tell?’

‘I’ve been counting ever since we left and at each three hundred seconds I’ve torn off a piece of cardboard. There’re thirty-nine bits now. At five minutes a go, that makes three hours and a quarter. Unless I’ve got it wrong, in fifteen or twenty minutes we shan’t be running down any more, but going back to where we came from.’

I thrust the tiller over to my right to slant across the stream and get into the bank on the Dutch side. Before we reached the shore the current had stopped. We were no longer going down; and we weren’t going up, either. It was still raining. We no longer smoked; we no longer talked – we whispered. ‘Take the paddle and shove.’ I paddled too, holding the tiller wedged under my right leg. Gently we came up against the bush: we seized branches and pulled, sheltering beneath them. We were in the darkness of the vegetation. The river was grey, quite covered with thick mist. If we had not been able to rely upon the ebb and flow of the tides, it would have been impossible to tell where the sea lay and where the landward river.

Right Out and Away

The flood-tide would last six hours. Then there was the hour and a half to wait for the ebb. I should be able to sleep for seven hours, although I was very much on edge. I had to get some sleep, because once out at sea, when should I be able to lie down? I stretched out between the barrel and the mast; Maturette laid a blanket over the thwart and the barrel by way of a cover, and there in the shelter I slept and slept. Dreams, rain, cramped position – nothing disturbed that deep, heavy sleep.

I slept and slept until Maturette woke me. ‘Papi, we think it’s time, or just about. The ebb has been running a good while.’

The boat had turned towards the sea and under my fingers the current raced by. It was no longer raining, and by the light of a quarter moon we could distinctly see the river a hundred yards in front of us, carrying trees, vegetation and dark shapes upon its surface. I tried to distinguish the exact place where the sea and river met. Where we were lying there was no wind. Was there any out in the middle? Was it strong? We pushed out from under the bush, the boat still hitched to a big root. Looking at the sky I could just make out the coast, where the river ended and the sea began. We had run much farther down than we had thought, and it seemed to me that we were under six miles from the mouth. We had a stiff tot of rum. Should we step the mast now? Yes, said the others. It was up, very strongly held in its heel and the hole in the thwart. I hoisted the sail without unfurling it, keeping it tight to the mast. Maturette was ready to haul up the staysail and jib when I said. All that was needed to fill the sail was to cast loose the line holding it close to the mast, and I’d be able to do that from where I sat. Maturette had one paddle in the bows and I had another in the stern: we should have to shove out very strong and fast, for the current was pressing us tight against the bank.

‘Everybody ready. Shove away. In the name of God.’

‘In the name of God,’ repeated Clousiot.

‘Into Thy hands I entrust myself,’ said Maturette.

And we shoved. Both together we shoved on the water with our blades – I thrust deep and I pulled hard: so did Maturette. We got under way as easy as kiss my hand. We weren’t a stone’s throw from the bank before the tide had swept us down a good hundred yards. Suddenly there was the breeze, pushing us out towards the middle.

‘Hoist the staysail and jib – make all fast.’ They filled: the boat reared-like a horse and shot away. It must have been later than the time we’d planned, because all of a sudden the river was as light as though the sun was up. About a mile away on our right we could see the French bank clearly, and perhaps half a mile on the left, the Dutch. Right ahead, and perfectly distinct the white crests of the breaking ocean waves.

‘Christ, we got the time wrong,’ said Clousiot. ‘Do you think we’ll have long enough to get out?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Look how high the waves are, and how they break so white! Can the flood have started?’

‘Impossible. I can see things going down.’

Maturette said, ‘We shan’t be able to get out. We shan’t be there in time.’

‘You shut your bloody mouth and sit there by the jib and staysail sheets. You shut up too, Clousiot.’

Bang. Bang. Rifles, shooting at us. I distinctly spotted the second. It was not screws firing at all: the shots were coming from Dutch Guiana. I hoisted the mainsail and it filled with such strength that the sheet tearing at my wrist nearly had me in the water. The boat lay over at more than forty-five degrees. I bore away as fast as I could – it wasn’t hard, for there was wind and to spare. Bang, bang, bang, and then no more. We had run farther towards the French side than the Dutch, and that was certainly why the firing stopped.

We tore along at a blinding speed, with a wind fit to carry everything away. We were going so fast that we shot across the middle of the estuary, and I could see that in a few minutes’ time we should be right up against the French bank. I could see men running towards the shore. Gently, as gently as possible, I came about, heaving on the sheet with all my strength. We came up into the wind: the jib went over all by itself and so did the staysail. The boat turned, turned, I let go the sheet and we ran out of the river straight before the wind. Christ, we’d done it! It was over! Ten minutes later a sea-wave tried to stop us; we rode over it smooth and easy, and the shwit shwit that the boat had made in the river changed to thumpo-thumpo-thump. The waves were high, but we went over them as easy as a kid playing leap-frog. Thump-o-thump, the boat went up and down the slopes without a shake or a tremble, only that thud of her hull striking the water as it came down.

‘Hurray, hurray! We’re out!’ roared Clousiot with the full strength of his lungs.

And to light up our victory over the elements the Lord sent us an astonishing sunrise. The waves came in a steady rhythm. Their height grew less the farther we went from the shore. The water was filthy – full of mud. Over towards the north it looked black; but later on it was blue. I had no need to look at my compass: with the sun there on my right shoulder I steered straight ahead going large but with the boat lying over less, for I had slackened off the sheet until the sail was just drawing pleasantly. The great adventure had begun.

Clousiot heaved himself up. He wanted to get his head and shoulders out to see properly. Maturette came and gave him a hand, sitting him up there opposite me with his back against the barrel: he rolled me a cigarette, lit it and passed it. We all three of us smoked.

‘Give me the tafia,’ said Clousiot. ‘This crossing of the bar calls for a drink.’ Maturette poured an elegant tot into three tin mugs; we clinked and drank to one another. Maturette was sitting next to me on my left: we all looked at one another. Their faces were shining with happiness, and mine must have been the same. Then Clousiot said to me, ‘Captain, sir, where are you heading for, if you please?’

‘Colombia, if God permits.’

‘God will permit all right, Christ above!’ said Clousiot.

The sun rose fast and we dried out with no difficulty at all. I turned the hospital shirt into a kind of Arab burnous. Wetted, it kept my head cool and prevented sunstroke. The sea was an opal blue; the ten-foot waves were very wide apart, and that made sailing comfortable. The breeze was still strong and we moved fast away from the shore; from time to time I looked back and saw it fading on the horizon. The farther we ran from that vast green mass, the more we could make out the lie of the land. I was gazing back when a vague uneasiness called me to order and reminded me of my responsibility for my companions’ lives and my own.

‘I’ll cook some rice,’ said Maturette.

‘I’ll hold the stove and you hold the pot,’ said Clousiot.

The bottle of paraffin was made fast right up forward where no one was allowed to smoke. The fried rice smelt good. We ate it hot, with two tins of sardines stirred into it. On top of that we had a good cup of coffee. ‘Some rum?’ I refused: it was too hot. Besides, I was no drinker. Clousiot rolled me cigarette after cigarette and lit them for me. The first meal aboard had gone off well. Judging from the sun, we thought it was ten o’clock in the morning. We had had only five hours of running out to sea and yet you could already feel that the water beneath us was very deep. The waves were not so high now, and as we ran across them the boat no longer thumped. The weather was quite splendid. I realized that during daylight I should not have to be looking at the compass all the time. Now and then I fixed the sun in relation to the needle and I steered by that – it was very simple. The glare tired my eyes and I was sorry I had not thought to get myself a pair of dark glasses.

Out of the blue Clousiot said, ‘What luck I had, finding you in hospital!’

‘It was just as lucky for me – you’re not the only one.’ I thought of Dega and Fernandez … if they’d said yes, they would have been here with us.

‘That’s not so certain,’ said Clousiot. ‘But it might have been tricky for you to get the Arab into the ward just at the right moment.’

‘Yes, Maturette has been a great help to us. I’m very glad we brought him, he’s as reliable as they come, brave and clever.’

‘Thanks,’ said Maturette. ‘And thank you both for believing in me, although I’m so young and although I’m you know what. I’ll do my best not to let you down.’

Then after a while I said, ‘François Sierra too, the guy I’d so much wanted to have with us; and Galgani…’

‘As things turned out, Papillon, it just wasn’t on. If Jesus had been a decent type and if he had given us a decent boat, we could have lain up and waited for them – we could have waited for Jesus to get them out and bring them. Anyhow, they know you, and they know that if you didn’t send for them, it was on account of it just wasn’t possible.’

‘By the way, Maturette, how come you were in the high-security ward?’

‘I never knew I was to be interned. I reported sick because I had a sore throat and because I wanted the walk, and when the doctor saw me he said, “I see from your card that you’re for internment on the islands, Why?” “I don’t know anything about it, Doctor. What’s internment mean?” “All right. Never mind. Hospital for you.” And there I was: that’s all there was to it.’

‘He meant to do you a good turn,’ said Clousiot.

‘What on earth did the quack want, sending me to hospital? Now he must be saying “My angel-faced boy wasn’t such a wet after all, seeing he’s got out – he’s on the run”’

We talked and laughed. I said, ‘Who knows but we may come across Julot, the hammer-man. He’ll be far off by now, unless he’s still lying up in the bush.’ Clousiot said, ‘When I left I put a note under my pillow saying, “Gone without leaving an address”’ That made us roar with laughter.

Five days we sailed on with nothing happening. The east-west passage of the sun acted as my compass by day: by night I used the compass itself. On the morning of the sixth day we were greeted by a brilliant sun; the sea had suddenly calmed, and flying-fishes went by not far away. I was destroyed with fatigue. During the night Maturette had kept wiping my face with a wet cloth to keep me from sleeping; but even so I went off, and Clousiot had had to burn me with his cigarette. Now it was dead calm, so I decided to get some sleep. We lowered the mainsail and the jib, keeping just the staysail, and I slept like a log in the bottom of the boat, the sail spread to keep me from the sun.

I woke up with Maturette shaking me. He said, ‘It’s noon or one o’clock, but I’m waking you because the wind is getting stronger and on the horizon where it’s coming from, everything’s black.’ I got up and went to my post. The one sail we had set was carrying us over the unruffled sea. In the east, behind me, all was black, and the breeze was strengthening steadily. The staysail and the jib were enough to make the boat run very fast. I furled the mainsail against the mast, carefully, and made all tight. ‘Look out for yourselves, because what’s coming is a storm.’

Heavy drops began to fall on us. The darkness came rushing forwards at an astonishing speed, and in a quarter of an hour it had spread from the horizon almost as far as us. Now here it came: an incredibly strong wind drove straight at us. As if by magic the sea got up faster, waves with foaming white tops: the sun was wiped right out, rain poured down in torrents, we could see nothing, and as the seas hit the boat so they sent packets of water stinging into my face. It was a storm all right, my first storm, with all the terrific splendour of nature unrestrained – thunder, lightning, rain, waves, the howling of the wind over and all around us.

The boat was carried along like a straw; she climbed unbelievable heights and ran down into hollows so deep you felt she could never rise up again. Yet in spite of these astonishing depths she did climb up the side of the next wave, go over the crest, and so begin once more – right up and down again and again. I held the tiller with both hands; and once, when I saw an even bigger wave coming I thought I should steer a little against it. No doubt I moved too fast, because just as we cut it, I shipped a great deal of water. The whole boat was aswim. There must have been about three foot of water aboard. Without meaning to I wrenched the boat strongly across the next wave – a very dangerous thing to do – and she leant over so much, almost to the point of turning turtle, that she flung out most of the water we had shipped.

‘Bravo!’ cried Clousiot. ‘You’re a real expert, Papillon! You emptied her straight away.’

I said, ‘You see now how it’s done, don’t you?’

If only he’d known that my lack of experience had very nearly turned us upside down, right out in the open sea! I decided not to struggle against the thrust of the waves any more, not to worry about what course to steer, but just to keep the boat as steady as possible. I took the waves three-quarters on; I let the boat run down and rise just as the sea would have it. Very soon I realized that this was an important discovery and that I’d done away with ninety per cent of the danger. The rain stopped: the wind was still blowing furiously, but now I could see clearly in front and behind. Behind, the sky was clear; in front it was black. We were in the middle of the two.

By about five it was all over. The sun was shining on us again, the breeze was its usual self, the sea had gone down: I hoisted the mainsail and we set off once more, pleased with ourselves. We baled the boat with the saucepans and we brought out the blankets to dry them by hanging them to the mast. Rice, flour, oil and double-strength coffee: a comforting shot of rum. The sun was about to set, lighting up the blue sea and making an unforgettable picture – reddish-brown sky, great yellow rays leaping up from the half-sunk orb and lighting the sky, and the few white clouds, and the sea itself. As the waves rose they were blue at the bottom, then green; and their crests were red, pink or yellow, according to the colour of the rays that hit them.

I was filled with a wonderfully gentle peace; and together with the peace a feeling that I could rely upon myself. I had stuck it out pretty well; this short storm had been very valuable to me. All by myself I had learnt how to handle the boat in such circumstances. I’d look forward to the night with a completely easy mind.

‘So you saw how to empty a boat, Clousiot, did you? You saw how it was done?’

‘Listen, brother, if you hadn’t brought it off, and if another wave had caught us sideways, we’d have sunk. You’re all right.’

‘You learnt all that in the navy?’ said Maturette.

‘Yes. There’s something to be said for a naval training, after all.’

We must have made a great deal of leeway. Who could tell how far we had drifted during those four hours, with a wind and waves like that? I’d steer north-west to make it up: that’s what I’d do. The sun vanished into the sea, sending up the last flashes of its firework display – violet this time – and then at once it was night.

For six more days we sailed on with nothing to worry us except for a few squalls and showers – none ever lasted more than three hours and none were anything like that first everlasting storm.

Ten o’clock in the morning and not a breath of wind: a dead calm. I slept for nearly four hours. When I woke my lips were on fire. They had no skin left; nor had my nose either; and my right hand was quite raw. Maturette was the same; so was Clousiot. Twice a day we rubbed our faces and hands with oil, but that was not enough – the tropical sun soon dried it.

By the sun it must have been two o’clock in the afternoon. I ate, and then, seeing it was dead calm, we rigged the sail as an awning. Fish came round the boat where Maturette had done the washing-up. I took the jungle-knife and told Maturette to throw in some rice – anyhow it had begun to ferment since the water had got at it. The fish all gathered where the rice struck the water, all on the surface; and as one of them had his head almost out of the water I hit at him very hard. The next moment there he was, belly up. He weighed twenty pounds: we gutted him and cooked him in salt water. We ate him that evening with manioc flour.

Now it was eleven days since we had set out to sea. In all that time we had only seen one ship, very far away on the horizon. I began to wonder where the hell we were. Far out, that was for sure; but how did we lie in relation to Trinidad or any of the other English islands? Speak of the devil … and indeed there, right ahead, we saw a dark speck that gradually grew larger and larger. Would it be a ship or a deep-sea fishing boat? We’d got it all wrong: it was not coming towards us. It was a ship: we could see it clearly now, but going across. It was coming nearer, true enough, but its slanting course was not going to bring us together. There was no wind, so our sails drooped miserably: the ship would surely not have seen us. Suddenly there was the bowl of a siren and then three short blasts. The ship changed course and stood straight for our boat.

‘I hope she doesn’t come too close,’ said Clousiot.

‘There’s no danger: it’s as calm as a millpond.’

She was a tanker. The nearer she came, the more clearly we could make out the people on deck. They must have been wondering what this nutshell of a boat was doing there, right out at sea. Slowly she approached, and now we could see the officers and the men of the crew. And the cook. Then women in striped dresses appeared on deck, and men in coloured shirts. We took it these were passengers. Passengers on a tanker – that struck me as odd. Slowly the ship came close and the captain hailed us in English, ‘Where do you come from?’

‘French Guiana.’

‘Do you speak French?’ asked a woman.

‘Oui, Madame.’

‘What are you doing so far out at sea?’

‘We go where God’s wind blows us.’

The lady spoke to the captain and then said, ‘The captain says to come aboard. He’ll haul your little boat on deck.’

‘Tell him we say thank you very much but we’re quite happy in our boat.’

‘Why don’t you want help?’

‘Because we are on the run and we aren’t going in your direction.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Martinique or even farther. Where are we?’

‘Far out in the ocean.’

‘What’s the course for the West Indies?’

‘Can you read an English chart?’

‘Yes.’

A moment later they lowered us an English chart, some packets of cigarettes, a roast leg of mutton and some bread. ‘Look at the chart.’

I looked and then I said, ‘I must steer west by south to hit the British West Indies, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘About how many miles?’

‘You’ll be there in two days,’ said the captain.

‘Good-bye! Thank you all very much.’

‘The captain congratulates you on your fine seamanship.’

‘Thank you. Good-bye!’

The tanker moved gently off, almost touching us; I drew away to avoid the churning of the propellers and just at that moment a sailor tossed me a uniform cap. It dropped right in the middle of the boat; it had a gold band and an anchor, and it was with this cap on my head that we reached Trinidad two days later, with no further difficulty.

Trinidad

Long before we saw it, the birds had told us land was near. It was half-past seven in the morning when they began to circle round us. ‘We’re getting there, man! We’re getting there! The first part of the break, the hardest part – we’ve brought it off. Freedom, freedom, freedom for ever!’ Joy made us shout like schoolboys. Our faces were plastered with the coconut-butter that the tanker had given us for our sunburn. At about nine o’clock we saw the land. A breeze carried us in quite fast over a gentle sea. It was not until four in the afternoon that we could make out the details of a long island, fringed with little clumps of white houses and topped with great numbers of coconut-palms. So far we could not tell whether it was really an island or a peninsula, nor whether these houses were lived in. We had to wait another hour and more before we could distinguish people running towards the beach where we were going to land. In under twenty minutes a highly-coloured crowd had gathered. The entire little village had come out on to the shore to welcome us. Later we learnt that it was called San Fernando.

Three hundred yards from the beach I dropped the anchor: it bit at once. I did so partly to see how the people would take it and partly so as not to damage my boat when it grounded, supposing the bottom was coral. We furled the sails and waited. A little boat came towards us. Two blacks paddling and one white man with a sun-helmet on.

‘Welcome to Trinidad,’ said the white man in perfect French. The black men laughed, showing all their teeth.

‘Thank you for your kind words, Monsieur. Is the bottom coral or sand?’

‘It’s sand. You can run in without any danger.’

We hauled up the anchor, and the waves gently pushed us in towards the beach. We had scarcely touched before ten men waded in and with a single heave they ran the boat up out of the water. They gazed at us and stroked us, and Negro or Indian coolie women beckoned to invite us in. The white man who spoke French explained that they all wanted us to stay with them. Maturette caught up a handful of sand and kissed it. Great enthusiasm. I had told the white man about Clousiot’s condition and he had him carried to his house, which was very close to the beach. He told us we could leave all our belongings in the boat until tomorrow – no one would touch anything. They all called out, ‘Good captain, long ride in little boat.’

Night fell, and when I had asked them to heave the boat a little higher up I tied it to a much bigger one lying on the beach; then I followed the Englishman and Maturette came after me. There I saw Clousiot looking very pleased with himself in an armchair, with a lady and a girl beside him and his wounded leg stretched out on a chair.

‘My wife and my daughter,’ said the gentleman. ‘I have a son at the university in England.’

‘You are very welcome in this house,’ said the lady in French.

‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ said the girl, placing us two wicker armchairs.

‘Thank you, ladies, but please don’t put yourselves out for us.’

‘Why? We know where you come from, so be easy; and I say again, you are very welcome in this house.’

The Englishman was a barrister. Mr. Bowen was his name, and he had his office in Port of Spain, the capital, twenty-five miles away. They brought us tea with milk, toast, butter and jam. This was our first evening as free men, and I shall never forget it. Not a word about the past, no untimely questions: only how many days had we been at sea and what kind of voyage we had had. Whether Clousiot was in much pain and whether we should like them to tell the police tomorrow or wait for another day: whether we had any living relations, such as wives or children. If we should like to write to them, they would post the letters. What can I say? It was a wonderful welcome, both from the people on the shore and from this family with their extraordinary kindness to three men on the run.

Mr. Bowen telephoned a doctor, who told him to bring the wounded man in to his nursing-home tomorrow afternoon so that he could X-ray him and see what needed doing. Mr. Bowen also telephoned the head of the Salvation Army in Port of Spain. He said this man would have a room ready for us in the Salvation Army hostel and that we could go whenever we liked; he said we should keep our boat if it was any good, because we’d need it for leaving again. He asked if we were convicts or relégués and we told him convicts. He seemed pleased we were convicts.

‘Would you like to have a bath and a shave?’ asked the girl. ‘Don’t feel awkward, whatever you do – it doesn’t worry us in the least. You’ll find some things in the bathroom that I hope will fit you.’

I went into the bathroom, had a bath, shaved and came out again with my hair combed, wearing grey trousers, a white shirt, tennis shoes and white socks.

An Indian knocked on the door: he was carrying a parcel which he gave to Maturette, telling him the doctor had noticed that as I was roughly the same size as the lawyer I wouldn’t need anything; but little Maturette wouldn’t find anything to fit, because there was no one as small as him in Mr. Bowen’s house. He bowed in the Moslem way and went out. What is there I can say about such kindness? There is no describing the feelings in my heart. Clousiot went to bed first, then the five of us talked about a great number of things. What interested those charming women most was how we thought of remaking a life for ourselves. Not a word about the past: only the present and the future. Mr. Bowen said how sorry he was Trinidad wouldn’t permit escaped men to settle on the island. He’d often tried to get permission for various people to stay, he told us, but it had never been allowed.

The girl spoke very good French, like her father, with no accent or faulty pronunciation. She had fair hair and she was covered with freckles; she was between seventeen and twenty – I did not like to ask her age. She said, ‘You’re very young and your life is ahead of you: I don’t know what you were sentenced for and I don’t want to know, but the fact of having taken to sea in such a small boat for this long, dangerous voyage proves that you’re willing to pay absolutely anything for your freedom; and that is something I admire very much.’

We slept until eight the next morning. When we got up we found the table laid. The two ladies calmly told us that Mr. Bowen had left for Port of Spain and would only be back that afternoon, bringing the information he needed to see what could be done for us.

By leaving his house to three escaped convicts like this he gave us a lesson that couldn’t have been bettered: it was as though he were saying, ‘You are normal decent human beings; you can see for yourselves how much I trust you, since I am leaving you alone in my house with my wife and daughter.’ We were very deeply moved by this silent way of saying, ‘Now that I’ve talked to you, I see that you are perfectly trustworthy – so much so that I leave you here in my home like old friends, not supposing for a moment that you could possibly do or say anything wrong.’

Reader – supposing this book has readers some day – I am not clever and I don’t possess the vivid style, the living power, that is needed to describe this immense feeling of self-respect – no, of rehabilitation, or even of a new life. This figurative baptism, this bath of cleanliness, this raising of me above the filth I had sunk in, this way of bringing me overnight face to face with true responsibility, quite simply changed my whole being. I had been a convict, a man who could hear his chains even when he was free and who always felt that someone was watching over him; I had been all the things I had seen, experienced, undergone, suffered; all the things that had urged me to become a marked, evil man, dangerous at all times, superficially docile yet terribly dangerous when he broke out: but all this had vanished – disappeared as though by magic. Thank you, Mr. Bowen, barrister in His Majesty’s courts of law, thank you for having made another man of me in so short a time!

The very fair-haired girl with eyes as blue as the sea around us was sitting with me under the coconut-palms in her father’s garden. Red, yellow and mauve bougainvillaeas were all in flower, and they gave the garden the touch of poetry that the moment called for. ‘Monsieur Henri, [she called me Monsieur! How many years had it been since anyone called me Monsieur?] as Papa told you yesterday, the British authorities are so unfair, so devoid of understanding, that unfortunately you can’t stay here. They only give you a fortnight to rest and then you must go off to sea again. I went to have a look at your boat early this morning: it looks very small and frail for such a long voyage as you have to make. Let’s hope you reach a more hospitable, understanding country than ours. All the English islands do the same in these cases. If you have a horrid time in the voyage ahead of you, I do ask you not to hold it against the people who live in these islands. They are not responsible for this way of looking at things: these are orders that come from England, from people who don’t know you. Papa’s address is 101 Queen Street, Port of Spain, Trinidad. If it’s God’s will that you can do so. I beg you to send us just a line to tell us what happens to you.’

I was so moved I didn’t know what to say. Mrs. Bowen came towards us. She was a very beautiful woman of about forty with chestnut hair and green eyes. She was wearing a very simple white dress with a white belt, and a pair of light-green sandals. ‘Monsieur, my husband won’t be home till five. He’s getting them to allow you to go to Port of Spain in his car without a police escort. He also wants to prevent your having to spend the first night in the Port of Spain police-station. Your wounded friend will go straight to a nursing-home belonging to a friend of ours, a doctor; and you two will go to the Salvation Army hostel.’

Maturette joined us in the garden: he’d been to see the boat, and he told us it was surrounded by an interested crowd. Nothing had been touched. The people looking at it had found a bullet lodged under the rudder: someone had asked whether he might pull it out as a souvenir. Maturette had replied, ‘Captain, captain,’ and the Indian had understood that the captain had to be asked. Maturette said, ‘Why don’t we let the turtles go?’

‘Have you got some turtles?’ cried the girl. ‘Let’s go and see them.’

We went down to the boat. On the way a charming little Hindu girl took my hand without the least shyness. All these different-coloured people called out ‘Good afternoon.’ I took the turtles out. ‘What shall we do? Put them back into the sea? Or would you like them for your garden?’

‘The pool at the bottom is sea-water. We’ll put them there, and then I’ll have something to remember you by.’

‘Fine.’ I gave the onlookers everything in the boat except for the compass, the tobacco, the water-cask, the knife, the machete, the axe, the blankets and the revolver, which I hid under the blankets – no one had seen it.

At five o’clock Mr. Bowen appeared. ‘Gentlemen, everything is in order. I’ll drive you to the capital myself. First we’ll drop the wounded man in at the nursing-home and then we’ll go to the hostel.’ We packed Clousiot into the back seat of the car: I was saying thank you to the girl when her mother came out bringing a suitcase and said to us, ‘Please take these few things of my husband’s – we give them to you with all our heart.’ What could we say in the face of such very great kindness? ‘Thank you, thank you again and again and again.’ We drove off in the car. At a quarter to six we reached the nursing-home – Saint George’s nursing-home. Nurses carried Clousiot’s stretcher to a ward with a Hindu in it, sitting up in his bed. The doctor came, and shook Bowen’s hand: he spoke no French but through Mr. Bowen he told us that Clousiot would be well looked after and that we could come and see him as often as we liked. We went through the town in Mr. Bowen’s car.

It astonished us, with all its lights and cars and bicycles. White men, black men, yellow men, Indians and coolies all mingled there, walking along the pavements of Port of Spain, a town of wooden houses. We reached the Salvation Army, a building whose ground floor alone was made of stone – the rest of wood. It was well placed in a brightly-lit square whose name I managed to read – Fish Market. We were welcomed by the captain of the Salvation Army together with all his staff, both men and women. He spoke a little French and all the others said things to us in English, which we did not understand; but their faces were so cheerful and their eyes so welcoming that we were sure the words were kind.

We were taken to a room on the second floor with three beds in it – the third being laid on for Clousiot. There was a bathroom just at hand, with towels and soap for us. When he had shown us our room, the captain said, ‘If you would like to eat, we all have supper together at seven o’clock, that is to say in half an hour’s time.’

‘No. We’re not hungry.’

‘If you’d like to walk about the town, here are two West Indies dollars to have some tea or coffee, or an ice. Take great care not to get lost. When you want to come back just ask your way by saying “Salvation Army, please”’

Ten minutes later we were in the street. We walked along the pavements; we pushed our way among other people; nobody looked at us or paid any attention to us: we breathed deeply, appreciating these first steps, free in a town, to the full. This continual trust in us, letting us go free in a fair-sized city, warmed our hearts: it not only gave us self-confidence but made us aware that we must wholly deserve this trust. Maturette and I walked slowly along in the midst of the throng. We needed to be among people, to be jostled, to sink into the crowd and form part of it. We went into a bar and asked for two beers. It seems nothing much just to say ‘Two beers, please.’ It’s so natural, after all. Yet still to us it seemed absolutely extraordinary when the Indian girl with the gold shell in her nose served us and then said, ‘Half a dollar, sir.’ Her pearly smile, her big dark violet eyes a little turned up at the corners, her shoulder-long black hair, her low-cut dress that showed the beginning of her breasts and let one guess the rest was splendid – all these things that were so trifling and natural for everybody else seemed to us to belong to some unheard-of fairyland. Hold it, Papi: this can’t be true. It can’t be true that you are turning from a convict with a life sentence, a living corpse, into a free man so quickly!

It was Maturette who paid: he had only half a dollar left. The beer was beautifully cool and he said, ‘What about another?’ It seemed to me that this second round was something we shouldn’t do. ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘it’s not an hour since you’ve been really free and you’re already thinking of getting drunk?’

‘Easy, easy now, Papi! Having two beers and getting drunk, those are two very different things.’

‘Maybe so. But it seems to me that rightly speaking, we shouldn’t fling ourselves on the first pleasures that come to hand. I think we ought to just taste them little by little and not stuff ourselves like hogs. Anyhow, to begin with this money’s not ours.’

‘Fair enough: you’re right. We must learn how to be free in slow stages – that’s more our mark.’

We went out and walked down Watters Street, the main avenue that runs clean through the town; and we were so wonderstruck by the trams going by, the donkeys with their little carts, the cars, the lurid cinema and dance-hall advertisements, the eyes of the young black or Indian girls, who looked smilingly at us, that we went all the way to the harbour without noticing it. There in front of us were ships all lit up – tourist ships with bewitching names, Panama, Los Angeles, Boston, Quebec; cargo-ships from Hamburg, Amsterdam and London. And side by side all along the quay there were bars, pubs and restaurants, all crammed with men and women jammed together, drinking, singing, bawling one another out. Suddenly I felt an irresistible urge to mingle with this crowd – common maybe, but so full of life. On the terrace of one bar there were oysters, sea-eggs, shrimps, solens and mussels arranged on ice, a whole display of sea-food to excite the appetite of the passer-by. There were tables with red-and-white checked cloths to invite us to sit down – most of them were occupied. And there were coffee-coloured girls with delicate profiles, mulattoes without a single negroid feature, tight in their many-coloured, low-cut blouses, to make you feel even more eager to make the most of what was going.

I went up to one of them and said, ‘French money good?’ showing her a thousand-franc note. ‘Yes, I change for you.’ ‘OK.’ She took the note and vanished into a room crammed with people. She came back. ‘Come here.’ And she led me to the cash desk, where there was a Chinese sitting.

‘You French?’

‘Yes.’

‘Change thousand francs?’

‘Yes.’

‘All West Indies dollars?’

‘Yes.’

‘Passport?’

‘Got none.’

‘Sailor’s card?’

‘Got none.’

‘Immigration papers?’

‘Got none.’

‘Fine.’ He said something to the girl: she looked over the room, went up to a nautical character with a cap like mine-gold band and anchor – and brought him to the cash desk. The Chinese said, ‘Your identity card?’

‘Here.’

And calmly the Chinese wrote out an exchange-form for a thousand francs in the stranger’s name and made him sign it; then the girl took him by the arm and led him away. He certainly never knew what had happened. I got two hundred and fifty West Indies dollars, fifty of them in one and two-dollar notes. I gave the girl one dollar; we went outside, and sitting there at a table we treated ourselves to an orgy of sea-food, washed down with a delightful dry white wine.

Fourth Exercise-Book First Break (continued)
Trinidad

I can still see our first night of freedom in that English town as clearly as though it was yesterday. We went everywhere, drunk with the light and the warmth in our hearts, and we plunged deep into the very being of the jolly, laughing crowd, overflowing with happiness. A bar, full of sailors and the tropical girls who were waiting there to pluck them. But there was nothing squalid about these girls; they were nothing like the women of the gutters of Paris, Le Havre or Marseilles. It was something else again – quite different. Instead of those overmade-up, vice-marked faces with their avid, cunning eyes, these were girls of every colour from Chinese yellow to African black, from light chocolate with smooth hair to the Hindu or Javanese whose parents had come together in the cocoa or sugar plantations, and so on to the Chinese-Indian girl with the gold shell in her nose and to the Llapane with her Roman profile and her copper-coloured face lit by two huge shining black eyes with long lashes, pushing out her half-covered bosom as though to say, ‘Look how perfect they are, my breasts.’ Each girl had different coloured flowers in her hair, and they were all of them the outward show of love; they made you long for women, without anything dirty or commercial about it. You didn’t feel they were doing a job – they were really having fun and you felt that money was not the main thing in their lives.

Like a couple of moths drawn by the light, Maturette and I went blundering along from bar to bar. It was as we were coming out into a little brightly-lit square that I noticed the time on a church clock. Two. It was two o’clock in the morning! Quick, quick, we must hurry back. We had been behaving badly. The Salvation Army captain would have a pretty low opinion of us. We must get back at once. I hailed a taxi, which took us there. Two dollars. I paid and we walked into the hostel, very much ashamed of ourselves. A really young blonde woman-soldier of the Salvation Army, twenty-five or thirty years old, welcomed us pleasantly in the hall. She seemed neither astonished nor vexed at our coming home so late. After a few words in English – we felt they were good-natured and kind – she gave us the key of our room and said good night. We went to bed. In the suitcase I found a pair of pyjamas. As we were putting out the light, Maturette said, ‘Still, I think we might say thank you to God for having given us so much so quickly. What do you think, Papi?’

‘You thank Him for me – he’s a great guy, your God. And you’re dead right. He’s been really generous with us. Good night.’ And I turned the light out.

This rising from the dead, this breaking out from the graveyard in which I had been buried, these emotions all crowding one upon another, this night of bathing in humanity, reintegrating myself with life and mankind – all these things had been so exciting that I could not get off to sleep. I closed my eyes, and in a kind of kaleidoscope all sorts of pictures, things and feelings appeared, but in no order at all; they were sharp and clear, but they came without any regard for time – the assizes, the Conciergerie, then the lepers, then Saint-Martin-de-Ré, Tribouillard, Jesus, the storm … It was as though everything I had lived through for the past year was trying to appear at the same moment before the eye of memory in a wild, nightmarish dance. I tried to brush these pictures aside, but it was no good. And the strangest part of it was that they were all mixed up with the noise of the pigs, the shrieks of the hocco, the howling of the wind and the crash of waves, the whole wrapped in the sound of the one-stringed fiddles the Indians had been playing just a little while ago in the various bars we had visited.

Finally, at dawn, I dropped off. Towards ten o’clock there was a knock on the door. Mr. Bowen came in, smiling. ‘Good morning, friends. Still in bed? You must have come home late. Did you have a good time?’

‘Good morning. Yes, we came in late. We’re sorry.’

‘Come, come: not at all. It’s natural enough, after all you’ve been through. You certainly had to make the most of your first night as free men. I’ve come so as to go to the police-station with you. You have to appear before them to make an official declaration of having entered the country illegally. When that formality’s over we’ll go and see your friend. They X-rayed him very early this morning. They will know the results later on.’

We washed quickly and went down to the room below, where Bowen was waiting for us with the captain.

‘Good morning, my friends,’ said the captain in bad French.

‘Good morning, everybody.’

A woman officer of the Salvation Army said, ‘Did you like Port of Spain?’

‘Oh yes, Madame! It was quite a treat for us.’

After a quick cup of coffee we went to the police-station. We walked – it was only about two hundred yards. All the policemen greeted us; they looked at us without any particular curiosity. Having passed two ebony sentries in khaki uniform we went into an impressive, sparsely-furnished office. An officer of about fifty stood up: he wore shorts, a khaki shirt and tie, and he was covered with badges and medals. Speaking French he said, ‘Good morning. Sit down. I should like to talk to you for a while before officially taking your statement. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-six and nineteen.’

‘What were you sentenced for?’

‘Manslaughter.’

‘What was your sentence?’

‘Transportation and hard labour for life.’

‘Then it was for murder, not manslaughter?’

‘No, Monsieur, in my case it was manslaughter.’

‘It was murder in mine,’ said Maturette. ‘I was seventeen.’

‘At seventeen you know what you’re doing,’ said the officer. ‘In England, if it had been proved, you would have been hanged. Right. The British authorities are not here to judge the French penal system. But there’s one thing we don’t agree with, and that’s the sending of criminals to French Guiana. We know it’s an inhuman punishment and one quite unworthy of a civilized nation like France. But unfortunately you can’t stay in Trinidad, nor on any other British island. It’s impossible. So I ask you to play it straight and not try to find any excuse – sickness or anything like that – to delay your departure. You may stay here quite freely in Port of Spain for from fifteen to eighteen days. It seems that your boat is a good one. I’ll have it brought round to the harbour for you. If there are any repairs needed the Royal Navy shipwrights will carry them out for you. On leaving you will be given the necessary stores, a good compass and a chart. I hope the South American countries will take you in. Don’t go to Venezuela, because there you’ll be arrested and forced to work on the roads until finally they hand you back to the French authorities. Now a man is not necessarily lost for ever because he has gone very badly wrong on one occasion. You are young and healthy and you look decent fellows, so I hope that after what you’ve been through you will not let yourselves be defeated for good. The fact of your having come as far as here is proof enough that that’s not the case. I’m glad to be one of the factors that will help you to become sound, responsible men. Good luck. If you have any difficulties, call this number. We’ll answer in French.’ He rang a bell and a civilian came for us. Our statement was taken in a large room where several policemen and civilians were working at their typewriters.

‘Why did you come to Trinidad?’

‘To recover our strength.’

‘Where did you come from?’

‘French Guiana.’

‘In your escape, did you commit any crime? Did you kill anyone or cause grievous bodily harm?’

‘We didn’t hurt anyone seriously.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We were told before we left.’

‘Your age, legal position with regard to France …’ And so on. ‘Gentlemen, you have fifteen to eighteen days in which to rest here. During that time you are entirely free to do what you like. If you change your hotel, let us know. I am Sergeant Willy. There are two telephone numbers on my card: this one is the official police number and the other my home. If anything happens and you want my help, call me at once. We know our trust in you is well placed. I’m sure you will behave well.’

A few moments later Mr. Bowen took us to the nursing-home. Clousiot was very glad to see us. We told him nothing about our night on the town. We only said they had left us free to go wherever we liked. He was so astonished that he said, ‘Without even an escort?’

‘Yes, without even an escort.’

‘Well, they must be a quaint lot, these rosbifs.’

Bowen had gone to see the doctor and now he came back with him. He said to Clousiot, ‘Who reduced the fracture for you, before splinting your leg?’

‘Me and another guy who’s not here.’

‘You did it so well there’s no need to break the leg again. The broken fibula was put back very neatly. We’ll just plaster it and give you an iron so that you can walk a little. Would you rather stay here or go with your friends?’

‘Go with them.’

‘Well, tomorrow you’ll be able to join them.’

We poured out our thanks. Mr. Bowen and the doctor left and we spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon with our friend. The next day we were delighted to find ourselves all together once more, the three of us in our hostel bedroom, with the window wide open and the fans going full blast to cool the air. We congratulated one another upon how fit we looked, and we said what fine fellows we were in our new clothes. When I saw the talk was going back over the past I said, ‘Now let’s forget the past as soon as possible and concentrate on the present and the future. Where shall we go? Colombia? Panama? Costa Rica? We ought to ask Bowen about the countries where we’re likely to be admitted.’

I called Bowen at his chambers: he wasn’t there. I called his house at San Fernando, and it was his daughter who answered. After some pleasant words she said, ‘Monsieur Henri, in the Fish Market near the hostel there are buses for San Fernando. Why don’t you come and spend the afternoon with us? Do come: I’ll be expecting you.’ And there we were, all three of us on the way to San Fernando. Clousiot was particularly splendid in his snuff-coloured semi-military uniform.

We were all three deeply moved by this return to the house that had taken us in with such kindness. It seemed as though the ladies understood our emotion, for both speaking together they said, ‘So here you are, home again! Sit yourselves down comfortably.’ And now, instead of saying Monsieur each time they spoke to us, they called us by our Christian names – ‘Henri, please may I have the sugar? André [Maturette’s name was André], a little more pudding?’

Mrs. Bowen and Miss Bowen, I hope that God has rewarded you for all the great kindness you showed us, and that your noble hearts – hearts that gave us so much joy – have never known anything but perfect happiness all your lives.

With a map spread out on the table, we asked their advice. The distances were very great: seven hundred and fifty miles to reach Santa Marta, the nearest Colombian port, thirteen hundred miles to Panama; one thousand four hundred and fifty to Costa Rica. Mr. Bowen came home. ‘I’ve telephoned all the consulates, and I’ve one piece of good news – you can stay a few days at Curaçao to rest. Colombia has no set rules about escaped prisoners. As far as the consul knows no one has ever reached Colombia by sea. Nor Panama nor anywhere else, either.’

‘I know a safe place for you,’ said Margaret, Mr. Bowen’s daughter. ‘But it’s a great way off – one thousand eight hundred miles at least.’

‘Where’s that?’ asked her father.

‘British Honduras. The governor is my godfather.’

I looked at my friends and said, ‘All aboard for British Honduras.’ It was a British possession with the Republic of Honduras on the south and Mexico on the north. Helped by Margaret and her mother we spent the afternoon working out the course. First leg, Trinidad to Curaçao, six hundred and twenty-five miles: second leg, Curaçao to some island or other on our route: third leg, British Honduras.

As you can never tell what will happen at sea, we decided that in addition to the stores the police would give us, we should have a special case of tinned things to fall back on – meat, vegetables, jam, fish, etc. Margaret told us that the Salvatori Supermarket would be delighted to make us a present of them. ‘And if they won’t,’ she said simply, ‘Mama and I will buy them for you.’

‘No, Mademoiselle.’

‘Hush, Henri.’

‘No, it’s really not possible, because we have money and it wouldn’t be right to profit by your kindness when we can perfectly well buy these stores ourselves.’

The boat was at Port of Spain, afloat in a Royal Navy dock. We left our friends, promising to see one another again before we finally sailed away. Every evening we went out punctually at eleven o’clock. Clousiot sat on a bench in the liveliest square and Maturette and I took it in turns to stay with him while the other wandered about the town. We had been here now for ten days. Thanks to the iron set in his plaster, Clousiot could walk without too much difficulty. We had learnt to get to the harbour by taking a tram. We often went in the afternoons and always at night. We were known and adopted in some of the bars down there. The police on guard saluted us and everybody knew who we were and where we came from, though there was never the slightest allusion to anything whatsoever. But we noticed that in the bars where we were known they charged us less for what we ate or drank than the sailors. It was the same with the tarts. Generally speaking, whenever they sat down at a table with sailors or officers or tourists they drank non-stop and always tried to make them spend as much as possible. In the bars where there was dancing, they would never dance with anyone unless he stood them a good many drinks first. But they all behaved quite differently with us. They would stay with us for quite a time and we had to press them before they’d drink anything at all: and then it wasn’t their notorious tiny glass, but a beer or a genuine whiskey and soda. All this pleased us very much, because it was an indirect way of saying that they knew how we were fixed and that they were on our side.

The boat had been repainted and the gunwale raised six inches. The keel had been strengthened. None of her ribs had suffered, and the boat was quite sound. The mast had been replaced by a longer but lighter spar, and the flour-sack jib and staysail by good ochre-coloured canvas. At the naval basin a captain gave me a fully-graduated compass and showed me how I could find roughly where I was by using the chart. Our course for Curaçao was marked out – west by north.

The captain introduced me to a naval officer in command of the training-ship Tarpon, and he asked me if I would be so good as to go to sea at about eight the next morning and run a little way out of the harbour. I did not understand why, but I promised to do so. I was at the basin next day at the appointed time, with Maturette. A sailor came aboard with us and I sailed out of the harbour with a fair wind. Two hours later, as we were tacking in and out of the port, a man-of-war came towards us. The officers and crew, all in white, were lined up on the deck. They went by close to us and shouted ‘Hurrah!’ They turned about and dipped their ensign twice. It was an official salute whose meaning I didn’t grasp. We went back to the naval basin, where the man-of-war was already tied up at the landing-stage. As for us, we moored alongside the quay. The sailor made signs to us to follow him; we went aboard and the captain of the ship welcomed us at the top of the gangway. The bosun’s pipe saluted our coming aboard, and when we had been introduced to the officers they led us past the cadets and petty-officers lined up and standing to attention. The captain said a few words to them in English and then they fell out. A young officer explained that the captain had just told the cadets we deserved a sailor’s respect for having made such a long voyage in that little boat; he also told them we were about to make an even longer and more dangerous trip. We thanked the officer for the honour we had been paid. He made us a present of three oilskins – they were very useful to us afterwards. They were black, and they fastened with a long zip: they had hoods.

Two days before we left, Mr. Bowen came to see us with a message from the police superintendent asking us to take three relégués with us – they had been picked up a week before. These relégués had been landed on the island and according to them their companions had gone on to Venezuela. I didn’t much care for the idea, but we had been treated too handsomely to be able to refuse to take the three men aboard. I asked to see them before giving my answer. A police-car came to fetch me. I went to see the superintendent, the high-ranking officer who had questioned us when we first came. Sergeant Willy acted as interpreter.

‘How are you?’

‘Very well, thanks. We should like you to do us a favour.’

‘With pleasure, if it’s possible.’

‘There are three French relégués in our prison. They were on the island illegally for some weeks and they claim that their friends marooned them here and then sailed away. We believe it’s a trick to get us to provide them with another boat. We have to get them off the island: it would be a pity if I were forced to hand them over to the purser of the first French ship that goes by.’

‘Well, sir, I’ll do the very best I possibly can; but I’d like to talk to them first. It’s a risky thing to take three unknown men aboard, as you will certainly understand.’

‘I understand. Willy, give orders to have the three Frenchmen brought out into the courtyard.’

I wanted to see them alone and I asked the sergeant to leave us to ourselves. ‘You’re relégués?’

‘No. We’re convicts.’

‘What did you say you were relégués for, then?’

‘We thought they’d rather have a man who’d done small crimes rather than big ones. We got it wrong: we see that now. And what about you? What are you?’

‘Convict.’

‘Don’t know you.’

‘I came on the last convoy. When did you?’

‘The 1929 shipment.’

‘Me on the ’27,’ said the third man.

‘Listen: the superintendent sent for me to ask me to take you aboard – there are three of us already. He said that if I won’t and that as there’s not one of you who knows how to handle a boat, he’ll be forced to put you aboard the first French ship that goes by. What have you got to say about it?’

‘For reasons of our own we don’t want to take to the sea again. We could pretend to leave with you and then you could drop us at the end of the island and carry on with your own break.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’ve been good to us here and I’m not going to pay them back with a kick in the teeth.’

‘Listen, brother, it seems to me you ought to put a convict before a rosbif.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re a convict yourself.’

‘Yes. But there are so many different kinds of convict that maybe there’s more difference between you and me than there is between me and the rosbifs. It all depends on where you sit.’

‘So you’re going to let us be handed over to the French authorities?’

‘No. But I’m not going to put you ashore before Curaçao, either.’

‘I don’t think I’ve the heart to begin all over again,’ said one of them.

‘Listen, have a look at the boat first. Perhaps the one you came in was no good.’

‘Right. Let’s have a go,’ said the two others.

‘OK. I’ll ask the superintendent to let you come and have a look at the boat.’

Together with Sergeant Willy we all went down to the harbour. The three guys seemed more confident once they had seen the boat.

Setting off Again

Two days later we and the three strangers left Trinidad. I can’t tell how they knew about it, but a dozen girls from the bars came down to see us go, as well as the Bowens and the Salvation Army captain. When one of the girls kissed me, Margaret laughed, and said, ‘Why, Henri, engaged so soon? You are a quick worker.’

‘Au revoir, everybody! No: good-bye! But just let me say what a great place you have in our hearts – nothing’ll ever change that.’

And at four in the afternoon we set out, towed by a tug. We were soon out of harbour, but we did not leave without wiping away a tear and gazing until the last moment at the people who had come to say good-bye and who were waving their white handkerchiefs. The moment the tug cast us off we set all our sails and headed into the first of the countless waves that we were to cross before we reached the end of our voyage.

There were two knives aboard: I wore one and Maturette the other. The axe was next to Clousiot, and so was the jungle-knife. We were certain that none of the others had any weapon. We arranged it so that only one of us should ever be asleep during the passage. Towards sunset the training-ship came and sailed along with us for half an hour. Then she dipped her ensign and parted company.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Leblond.’

‘Which convoy?’

‘’27.’

‘What sentence?’

‘Twenty years.’

‘What about you?’

‘Kargueret, 1929 convoy: fifteen years. I’m a Breton.’

‘You’re a Breton and you can’t sail a boat?’

‘That’s right.’

The third said, ‘My name’s Dufils and I come from Angers. I got life for a silly crack I made in court: otherwise it’d have been ten years at the outside. 1929 convoy.’

‘What was the crack?’

‘Well, I’d killed my wife with a flat-iron, you see. During the trial a juryman asked me why the flat-iron. I don’t know what possessed me but I told him I’d used a flat-iron on account of she needed smoothing out. According to my lawyer it was that bloody-fool remark that made them give me such a dose.’

‘Where did you all make your break from?’

‘A logging camp they call Cascade, fifty miles from Saint-Laurent. It wasn’t hard to get out – they give you a lot of freedom there. We just walked off, the five of us – nothing simpler.’

‘How come, five? Where are the other two?’

An awkward silence. Clousiot said, ‘Man, there are only straight guys here, and since we’re together we’ve got to know. Tell.’

‘I’ll tell you, then,’ said the Breton. ‘We were five when we left, all right: but the two missing guys who aren’t here now were from Cannes and they’d told us they were fishermen back at home. They paid nothing for the break because they said their work in the boat would be worth more than any money. Well, on the way we saw that neither the one nor the other knew the first thing about the sea. We were on the edge of drowning twenty times. We went creeping along the shore – first the coast of Dutch Guiana, then British Guiana, and then finally Trinidad. Between Georgetown and Trinidad I killed the one who said he would act as leader of the break. The guy had it coming to him, because to get off not paying he had lied to everyone about what a seaman he was. The other thought he was going to be killed too and he threw himself into the sea during a squall, letting go the tiller. We managed as best we could. We let the boat fill with water a good many times and in the end we smashed against a rock – it was a miracle we got out alive. I give you my word of honour everything I’ve said is the exact truth.’

‘It’s true,’ said the two others. ‘That’s just how it happened, and we all three of us agreed about killing the guy. What do you say about it, Papillon?’

‘I’m in no position to judge.’

‘But what would you have done in our place?’ insisted the Breton.

‘I’d have to think it over. You want to live through things like that to know what’s right and what’s not: otherwise you just can’t tell where the truth lies.’

Clousiot said, ‘I’d have killed him, all right. That lie might have caused the death of everyone aboard.’

‘OK. Let’s scrub it. But I’ve got a hunch you were scared through and through. You’re still scared, and you’re only at sea because there’s no choice. Is that right?’

‘Bleeding right,’ they answered all together.

‘Well then, there’s not got to be any panic here, whatever happens. Whatever happens nobody’s got to show he’s afraid. If anyone’s scared, just let him keep his trap shut. This is a good boat: it’s proved that. We’re heavier laden than we were, but then she’s been raised six inches all round. That more than compensates.’

We smoked; we drank coffee. We had had a good meal before leaving and we decided not to have another before next morning.

This was 9 December 1933, forty-two days since the break had started in the high security ward of the hospital at Saint-Laurent. It was Clousiot, the company’s accountant, who told us that. I had three very valuable things that we lacked when we set out – a waterproof steel watch bought in Trinidad, a real good compass in gimbals, and a pair of celluloid sunglasses. Clousiot and Maturette each had a cap.

Three days passed with nothing much happening, apart from our twice meeting with schools of dolphins. They made our blood run cold, because one band of eight started playing with the boat. First they’d run under it longways and come up just in front – sometimes one of them would touch us. But what really made us quake was the next caper. Three dolphins in a triangle, one in front and then two abreast, would race straight for our bows, tearing through the water. When they were within a hair’s breadth of us they would dive and then come up on the right and the left of the boat. Although we had a good breeze and we were running right before it they went still faster than we did. The game lasted for hours: it was ghastly. The slightest mistake on their part and they would have tipped us over. The three newcomers said nothing, but you should have seen their miserable faces!

In the middle of the night of the fourth day a perfectly horrible storm broke out. It really was something quite terrifying. The worst part of it was that the waves didn’t follow one another in the same direction. As often as not they collided and broke against one another. Some were long and deep, others choppy – there was no understanding it. Nobody uttered a word except for Clousiot; from time to time he called out, ‘Go it, mate! You’ll do this one, just like the rest.’ Or ‘Keep an eye out for the one behind!’

A very curious thing was that sometimes they would come three-quarters on, roaring and capped with foam. Fine: I’d have plenty of time to judge their speed and work out the right angle to take them. Then suddenly, unreasonably, there’d be one roaring right up over the boat’s stern, immediately behind. Many a time they broke over my shoulders and then of course a good deal came into the boat. The five men baled non-stop with tins and saucepans. Still, I never filled her more than a quarter full and so we were never in danger of sinking. This party lasted a good half of the night, close on seven hours. Because of the rain we never saw the sun at all until eight.

We were all of us, including me, heartily glad to see this sun shining away with all its might after the storm. Before anything else, coffee. Scalding hot coffee with Nestlé’s milk and ship’s biscuits: they were as hard as iron, but once they were chunked in coffee they were wonderful. The night’s struggle against the storm had worn me right out, and although there was still a strong wind and a heavy, uneven sea, I asked Maturette to take over for a while. I just had to sleep. I hadn’t been lying down ten minutes before Maturette took a wave the wrong way and the boat was three quarters swamped. Every thing was afloat – tins, stove, blankets, the lot. I reached the tiller with the water up to my waist and I just had time to avoid a breaking wave coming right down upon us. With a heave of the tiller I put us stern-on: the sea did not come in but thrust us forward for a good ten yards.

Everyone baled. With the big saucepan Maturette flung out three gallons at a time. No one bothered about saving anything at all – there was only one idea and that was to empty the boat of all this water that was making her so heavy that she could not struggle against the sea. I must admit the three newcomers behaved well; and when the Breton’s tin was swept away, alone he took the quick decision to ease the boat by letting go the water-cask, which he heaved overboard. Two hours later everything was dry, but we had lost our blankets, primus, charcoal stove and charcoal, the wicker bottle of paraffin and the water-cask, the last on purpose.

At midday I went to put on another pair of trousers, and it was then that I noticed that my little suitcase had gone overboard too, together with two of the three oilskins. Right at the bottom of the boat we found two bottles of rum. All the tobacco was either gone or soaked: the leaves and their water-tight tin had disappeared. I said, ‘Brothers, let’s have a good solid tot of rum to begin with, and then open the reserves and see what we can reckon on. Here’s fruit juice: good. We’ll ration ourselves for what we can drink. Here are some tins of biscuits: let’s empty one and make a stove of it. We’ll stow the other tins in the bottom of the boat and make a fire with the wood of the box. A little while ago we were all pretty scared, but the danger’s over now: we’ve just got to get over it and not let the others down. From this moment on, no one must say “I’m thirsty”, no one must say “I’m hungry”; and no one must say “I feel like a smoke” OK?’

‘OK, Papi.’

Everyone behaved well and providentially the wind dropped so that we could make a soup with bully-beef for a basis. A mess tin full of this with ship’s biscuits soaked in it gave us a comfortable lining, quite enough until tomorrow. We brewed a very little green tea for each man. And in an unbroken box we found a carton of cigarettes: they were little packets of eight, and there were twenty-four of them. The other five decided that I alone should smoke, to help me keep awake; and so there should be no ill-feeling, Clousiot refused to light them for me, but he did pass me the match. What with this good understanding aboard, nothing unpleasant happened at any time.

Now it was six days since we had sailed, and I had not yet been able to sleep. But this afternoon I did sleep, the sea being as smooth as glass: I slept, flat out, for nearly five hours. It was ten in the evening when I woke. A flat calm still. They had had a meal without me and I found a very well cooked kind of polenta made of maize flour – tinned, of course – and I ate it with a few smoked sausages. It was delicious. The tea was almost cold, but that didn’t matter in the least. I smoked, waiting for the wind to make up its mind to blow.

The night was wonderfully starlit. The pole star shone with all its full brilliance and only the Southern Cross outdid it in splendour. The Great and the Little Bear were particularly clear. Not a cloud, and already the full moon was well up in the starry sky. The Breton was shivering. He had lost his jacket and he was down to his shirt. I lent him the oilskin.

We began the seventh day. ‘Mates, we can’t be very far from Curaçao. I have a hunch I made a little too much northing, so now I’ll steer due west, because we mustn’t miss the Dutch West Indies. That would be serious, now we’ve no fresh water left and all the food’s gone except for the reserve.’

‘We leave it to you, Papillon,’ said the Breton.

‘Yes, we leave it to you,’ said all the others together. ‘You do what you think right.’

‘Thanks.’

It seemed to me that what I had said was best. All night long the wind had failed us and it was only about four in the morning that a breeze set us moving again. This breeze strengthened during the forenoon, and for thirty-six hours it blew strong enough to carry us along at a fair rate, but the waves were so gentle we never thumped at all.

Curaçao

Gulls. First their cries, because it was still dark, and then the birds themselves, wheeling above the boat. One settled on the mast, lifted off, then settled again. All this flying around lasted three hours and more until the dawn came up, with a brilliant sun. Nothing on the horizon showed any hint of land. Where the hell did all these gulls and sea-birds come from? Our eyes searched throughout the day, and searched in vain. Not the least sign of land anywhere near. The full moon rose just as the sun was setting; and this tropical moon was so strong that its glare hurt my eyes. I no longer had my dark glasses – they had gone with that diabolical old wave, as well as all our caps. At about eight o’clock, very far away in this lunar daylight, we saw a dark line on the horizon.

‘That’s land all right,’ said I, the first of us all to say it.

‘Yes, so it is.’

In short, everybody agreed that they could see a dark line that must be land of some sort. All through the rest of the night I kept my bows pointed towards this shadow, which grew clearer and clearer. We were getting there. No clouds, a strong wind and tall but regular waves, and we were running in as fast as we could go. The dark mass did not rise high over the water, and there was no way of telling whether the coast was cliffs, rocks or beach. The moon was setting on the far side of the land, and it cast a shadow that prevented me from seeing anything except a line of lights at sea-level, continuous at first and then broken. I came closer and closer, and then, about half a mile from the shore, I dropped anchor. The wind was strong, the boat swung round and faced the waves, which it took head-on every time. It tossed us around a great deal and indeed it was very uncomfortable. The sails were lowered and furled, of course. We might have waited until daylight in this unpleasant but safe position, but unhappily the anchor suddenly lost its hold. To steer a boat, it has to be moving: otherwise the rudder has no bite. We hoisted the jib and stay-sail, but then a strange thing happened – the anchor would not get a grip again. The others hauled the rope aboard: it came in without any anchor. We had lost it. In spite of everything I could do the waves kept heaving us in towards the rocks of this land in such a dangerous way that I decided to hoist the mainsail and run in on purpose – run in fast. This I carried out so successfully that there we were, wedged between two rocks, with the boat absolutely shattered. No one bawled out in panic, but when the next wave came rolling in we all plunged into it and ended up on shore, battered, tumbled, soaked, but alive. Only Clousiot, with his plastered leg, had a worse time than the rest of us. His arm, face and hands were badly scraped. We others had a few bangs on the knees, hands and ankles. My ear had come up against a rock a little too hard, and it was dripping with blood.

Still, there we were, alive on dry land, out of the reach of the waves. When day broke we picked up the oilskin and I turned the boat over – it was beginning to go to pieces. I managed to wrench the compass from its place in the stern-sheets. There was no one where we had been cast up, nor anywhere around. We looked at the line of lights, and later we learned that they were there to warn fishermen that the place was dangerous. We walked away, going inland; and we saw nothing, only cactuses, huge cactuses, and donkeys. We reached a well, tired out, for we had had to carry Clousiot, taking turns with two of us making a kind of chair with joined hands. Round the well there were the dried carcasses of goats and asses. The well was empty, and the windmill that had once worked it was now turning idly, bringing nothing up. Not a soul; only these goats and donkeys.

We went on to a little house whose open doors invited us to walk in. We called out ‘Haloo! Haloo!’ Nobody. On the chimney-piece a canvas bag with its neck tied by a string; I took it and opened it. As I opened it the string broke – it was full of florins, the Dutch currency. So we were on Dutch territory: Bonaire, Curaçao or Aruba. We put the bag back without touching anything; we found water and each drank in turn out of a ladle. No one in the house, no one anywhere near. We left, and we were going along very slowly, because of Clousiot, when an old Ford blocked our path.

‘Are you Frenchmen?’

‘Yes, Monsieur.’

‘Get into the car, will you?’ Three got in behind and we settled Clousiot on their knees; I sat next to the driver and Maturette next to me.

‘You’ve been wrecked?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anyone drowned?’

‘No.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Trinidad.’

‘And before that?’

‘French Guiana.’

‘Convicts or relégués?’

‘Convicts.’

‘I’m Dr. Naal, the owner of this property; it’s a peninsula running out from Curaçao. They call it Ass’s Island. Goats and asses live here, feeding on the cactuses, in spite of the long thorns. The common nickname for those thorns is the young ladies of Curaçao.’

I said, ‘That’s not very flattering for the real young ladies of Curaçao.’ The big, heavy man laughed noisily. With an asthmatic gasp the worn-out Ford stopped of its own accord. I pointed to a herd of asses and said, ‘If the car can’t manage it any more, we can easily have ourselves pulled.’

‘I’ve got a sort of harness in the boot, but the great difficulty is to catch a couple and then put the harness on.’ The fat fellow opened the bonnet and found that a particularly heavy lurch had disconnected a plug. Before getting in he gazed all round, looking uneasy. We set off again, and having bumped along rough tracks we came to a white barrier across the road. Here there was a little white cottage. He spoke in Dutch to a very light-coloured, neatly-dressed Negro who kept saying, ‘Ya, master; ya, master.’ Then he said, ‘I’ve given this man orders to stay with you until I come back and give you something to drink if you’re thirsty. Will you get out?’ We got out and sat on the grass in the shade. The aged Ford went gasping away. It had scarcely gone fifty yards before the black, speaking papiamento – a Dutch West Indies patois made up of English, Dutch, French and Spanish words – told us that his boss, Dr. Naal, had gone to fetch the police, because he was very frightened of us: he had told him to look out for himself, we being escaped thieves. And the poor devil of a mulatto couldn’t do enough to try to please us. He made us some coffee: it was very weak, but in that heat it did us good. We waited for more than an hour and then there appeared a big van after the nature of a black maria with six policemen dressed in the German style, and an open car with a uniformed chauffeur and three gentlemen behind, one of them being Dr. Naal.

They got out, and the smallest, who looked like a new-shaven priest, said to us, ‘I am the superintendent in charge of security for the island of Curaçao. My position obliges me to place you under arrest. Have you committed any crimes since your arrival upon the island and if so what? And which of you?’

‘Monsieur, we are escaped prisoners. We have come from Trinidad, and only a few hours ago we wrecked our boat on your rocks. I am the leader of this little band and I can assure you not one of us has committed the slightest crime.’

The superintendent turned towards Dr. Naal and spoke to him in Dutch. They were both talking when a fellow hurried up on a bicycle. He talked loud and fast, as much to Dr. Naal as to the policeman.

‘Monsieur Naal,’ I said, ‘why did you tell this man we were thieves?’

‘Because before I met you this fellow told me he watched you from behind a cactus and he had seen you go into his house and then come out of it again. He’s an employee of mine – he looks after some of my asses.’

‘And just because we went into the house does that mean we’re thieves? What you say doesn’t make sense, Monsieur: all we did was to take some water – you don’t call that theft, do you?’

‘And what about the bag of florins?’

‘Yes, I did open that bag; and in fact I broke the string as I did so. But I most certainly didn’t do anything but look to see what kind of money it had in it, and so to find out what country we had reached. I scrupulously put the money and the bag back where they were, on the chimney-piece.’

The policeman looked me right in the eye, and then turning he spoke to the character on the bicycle very severely. Dr. Naal made as though to speak. Harshly, in the German style, the superintendent cut him short. Then he made the newcomer get into the open car next to the chauffeur, got in himself with two policemen and drove off. Naal and the other man who had come with him walked into the house with us.

‘I must explain,’ he said. ‘That man had told me the bag had vanished. Before having you searched, the superintendent questioned him, because he thought he was lying. If you’re innocent, I’m very sorry about the whole thing; but it wasn’t my fault.’

Less than a quarter of an hour later the car came back and the superintendent said to me, ‘You told the truth: that man was a disgusting liar. He will be punished for having tried to damage you like this.’ Meanwhile the fellow was being loaded aboard the black maria: the five others got in too and I was about to follow when the superintendent held me back and said, ‘Get into my car next to the driver.’ We set out ahead of the van and very quickly we lost sight of it. We took proper macadamed roads and then came to the town with its Dutch-looking houses. Everything was very clean, and most of the people were on bicycles – there were hundreds of them coming and going in every direction. We reached the police-station. We went through a big office with a good many policemen in it, all dressed in white and each at his own desk, and we came to an inner room. It had air-conditioning, and it was cool. A big fat fair-haired man of about forty was sitting there in an armchair. He got up and spoke in Dutch. When their first remarks were over the superintendent, speaking French, said, ‘This is the chief of police of Curaçao. Chief, this Frenchman is the leader of the band of six we’ve just picked up.’

‘Very good, Superintendent. As shipwrecked men, you are welcome to Curaçao. What’s your name?’

‘Henri.’

‘Well, Henri, you have had a very unpleasant time with this business of the bag of money, but from your point of view it’s all for the best, because it certainly proves you are an honest man. I’ll give you a sunny room with a bunk in it so you can get some rest. Your case will be put before the governor and he will take appropriate measures. The superintendent and I will speak in your favour.’ He shook hands and we left. In the courtyard Dr. Naal apologized and promised to use his influence on our behalf. Two hours later we were all shut up in a very large kind of ward with a dozen beds in it and a long table and benches down the middle. Through the open window we asked a policeman to buy us tobacco, cigarette-paper and matches, with Trinidad dollars. He did not take the money and we didn’t understand his reply.

‘That coal-black character seems too devoted to his duty by half,’ said Clousiot. ‘We still haven’t got that tobacco.’

I was just about to knock on the door when it opened. A little man looking something like a coolie and wearing prison uniform with a number on the chest so that there should be no mistake, said, ‘Money, cigarettes.’ ‘No. Tobacco, matches and paper.’ A few minutes later he came back with all these things and with a big steaming pot – chocolate or cocoa. He brought bowls too, and we each of us drank one full.

I was sent for in the afternoon, and I went to the chief of police’s office again. ‘The governor has given me orders to let you walk about in the prison courtyard. Tell your companions not to try to escape, for that would lead to very serious consequences for all of you. Since you are the leader, you may go into the town for two hours every morning, from ten until twelve, and then in the afternoon from three until five. Have you any money?’

‘Yes. English and French.’

‘A plain-clothes policeman will go with you wherever you choose during your outings.’

‘What are they going to do to us?’

‘I think we’ll try to get you aboard tankers one by one – tankers of different nationalities. Curaçao has one of the biggest oil refineries in the world: it treats oil from Venezuela, and so there are twenty or twenty-five tankers from all countries coming and going every day. That would be the ideal solution for you, because then you would reach the other countries without any sort of difficulty.’

‘What countries, for example? Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Canada, Cuba, the United States or the countries which have English laws?’

‘Impossible. Europe’s just as impossible too. Don’t you worry: just you rely on us and let us do our best to help you make a new start in life.’

‘Thank you, Chief.’

I repeated all this very exactly to my companions. Clousiot, the sharpest crook of us all, said, ‘What do you think of it, Papillon?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’m afraid it may be a piece of soap so we’ll keep quiet and not escape.’

‘I’m afraid you may be right,’ he said.

The Breton believed in this wonderful scheme. The flat-iron guy was delighted: he said, ‘No more boats, no more adventures, and that’s for sure. We each of us land up in some country or other aboard a big tanker and then we fade right away.’ Leblond was of the same opinion.

‘What about you, Maturette?’

And this kid of nineteen, this little wet-leg who had accidentally been turned into a convict, this boy with features finer than a girl, raised his gentle voice and said, ‘And do you people really think these square-headed cops are going to produce bent papers for each one of us? Or even actually forge them? I don’t. At the most they might close their eyes if we went off one by one, and illegally got aboard a tanker on its way out: but nothing more. And even then they’d only do so to get rid of us without a headache. That’s what I think. I don’t believe a word of it.’

I went out very little: just now and then in the mornings, to buy things. We had been here a week now, and nothing had happened. We were beginning to feel anxious. One evening we saw three priests accompanied by policemen going round the cells and wards. They stopped for a long while in the cell nearest to us, where a Negro accused of rape was shut up. We thought they might come to see us, so we went back into the ward and sat there, each on his bed. And indeed all three of them did come in, together with Dr. Naal, the chief of police and someone in a white uniform I took to be a naval officer.

‘Monseigneur, here are the Frenchmen,’ said the chief of police in French. ‘Their behaviour has been excellent.’

‘I congratulate you, my sons. Let us sit down on the benches round this table; we shall be able to talk better like that.’ Everyone sat down, including the people who were with the bishop. They brought a stool that stood by the door in the courtyard and put it at the head of the table. That way the bishop could see everybody. ‘Nearly all Frenchmen are Catholics: is there any one among you who is not?’ Nobody put up his hand. It seemed to me that I too ought to look upon myself as a Catholic. ‘My friends, I descend from a French family. My name is Irénée de Bruyne. My people were Huguenots, Protestants who fled to Holland at the time Catherine de Medicis was hunting them down. So I am a Frenchman by blood. I am the bishop of Curaçao, a town where there are more Protestants than Catholics, but where the Catholics are very zealous and attentive to their duties. What is your position?’

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