It is common that after the age of 50 we feel the need to look behind us, and seeing the film of our existence in reverse, we inevitably return to childhood, which often constitutes the matrix of our being. It also sometimes happens that even before childhood, even before birth, the first name chosen by our parents has such a powerful charge that our life will be marked by it. The beautiful book by Lionel Daudet, The Mountaineerreturns to this and analyzes the echoes that his first name – chosen in reference to the great mountaineer Lionel Terray by his mountain-loving parents – had on his life.
Born in Saumur, far from the peaks, the child read feverishly the books from the family library in which the stories of mountaineers, Herzog, Rébuffat, Lachenal, Desmaison, Messner, but especially Terray, majestically occupy the shelves. These men then become masters and companions.
Terray was one of the most remarkable mountaineers of the 20th century, who participated in the conquest of Annapurna and allowed, with the help of Rébuffat, his two comrades who had reached the summit to return alive. With Lachenal, he formed a legendary team that successfully completed the most difficult climbs of their time. Guide and teacher, director, lecturer, Terray never stopped exploring adventure terrains, from the Alps to the Himalayas, from the Peruvian Andes to Patagonia and Alaska.
He is also the author of a book whose title, The Conquerors of the Uselessis one of the most beautiful mountain literature, and which has since continued to designate those who devote their lives to this curious passion of confronting the void, the cold, the verticality, the harshness of a universe where men, to tell the truth, have no place.
Virtuous practices
Lionel Terray died in 1965 in Vercors. Marc Martinetti, his young rope partner, and he slide down grassy slopes after climbing the Fissure in an arc. Their bodies were found at the bottom of the rocks a few days later.
This last path is the pretext for Lionel Daudet to trace the thread of his life and intertwine it with that of Lionel Terray. One beautiful September morning, with his comrade Patrick Wagnon, he undertook this climb. We follow them length after length, and each relay pose allows the one we nickname the Dod to take us back in the footsteps of Terray.
But more than an additional contribution to the myth of a giant, Lionel Daudet’s literary approach is both a modestly autobiographical project and a reflection on our practice of the mountains. By comparing the image of Terray, its heritage, the way in which, in the fifties and sixties, mountaineering was conceived, with the way in which we approach the mountain today, Daudet shows how much we have changed, and must even more do it. And this is how the example of Terray, whose approach was not only concerned with exploits, but took care to be interested in the places he crossed, in the people he met, recounting them, filming, can today nourish virtuous practices, respectful of the mountains and those who live there.
A man’s passion
Lionel Daudet is a remarkable mountaineer, whose talent is as great as his humility, and who was keen to combine his passion for climbing with the ecological and political concern of preserving this environment which has become his living and playing field. He also knew how to broaden his field of discovery through original projects, such as the one which took him on a very long journey to all the borders of our country, and which he recounted in The Tour de France, exactly (Stock), published in 2014.
But what this book shows magnificently above all is a man’s passion for places that I myself once described as “essential”, in the sense of frequenting them in one way or another. another, as a simple contemplator or as a seasoned climber, reveals the truest part of our being.
Roped in Terray by memory, the heart and the gesture that makes him place his hand on each scale of rock, each graton that the great departed himself once seized during his final ascent, Lionel Daudet intertwines two lives and two destinies, one having fertilized and nourished the other. An exercise in admiration as well as introspection, The Mountaineer has its place alongside the stories of the greatest.
The Mountaineer. In the footsteps of Lionel Terray, by Lionel Daudet. Stock, 324 p., €20.90.
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