Word: papillons
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Total Recall. Part II is set in Venezuela. Papillon becomes an honest citizen. He marries and works variously as gold prospector, nightclub manager, fireman, bush-league dentist, commercial shrimp fisherman. More than 20 years pass. It is 1967. He is over 60 now, and down on his luck. He reads a book of prison memoirs by an Algerian-born lady ex-con named Albertine Sarrazin. Hastily, he buys 13 school notebooks. In a few months, apparently with near total recall, he scribbles Part I (1931 to 1945) in longhand and mails it to Sarrazin's editors in Paris. Called...
Meanwhile, thinly disguised as an ex-con named Henri Charrière, who manages to resemble both the late Robert Benchley and not-so-early George Raft, Papillon the man has turned up in Paris to promote Papillon the book. He is photographed with Brigitte Bardot. For Paris Match, he revisits French Guiana and poses in the crumbling cells of the now abandoned penal colony. "Would you like to come back to France for good?" a reporter asks him. "France is my blood," says Papillon, with that terse flair that never seems to desert him. "Venezuela is my heaven...
...Papillon will fare in the New World is not entirely clear. Its author will surely grow richer and more famous, but he may not be read so avidly as he was in France. As a man he seems both hard to dislike or profoundly distrust. But his story often seems too good to be true, and raises the question of just how much Sunday supplemental escapee-from-Devil's Island experience he has incorporated as his own. For example, on one cavale (escape) he gets help from an island full of lepers, and when one hands him some coffee...
Thrilling adventure tales are to a large extent translation-proof. But the French colloquially use words like noble and ignoble that in English (and in a rather stodgy translation, too) sometimes make Papillon sound a little like The Rover Boys on Land and Sea. Perhaps more important, the kind of sympathy for Papillon that helped the book so much in France is based on a peculiarly Gallic preoccupation with justice miscarried. For years, France has treated men charged with crimes as guilty until proved innocent, and generally looked upon prison as a place that prisoners should either not survive...
Pimps and Pirates. What will be going for Papillon in the U.S. is its strain of fashionable neoRomanticism. Particularly when extolling the simplicity of the Indians with whom he lived for more than six months in 1934, Papillon offers Rousseauesque passages damning society and praising the noble savage. Indeed, the book is profoundly optimistic about human nature. Its pages are crowded with pimps, pirates and murderers. But, except for those who cruelly serve the prison system, they live in a subsociety marked by a degree of order and a scrupulousness that often goes far enough beyond "honor among thieves...