PAPILLON by Henri Charrière. 434 pages. William Morrow. $8.95.
Even his underworld name is perfect: Papillon—because he has a butterfly tattooed on his chest.
His real-life scenario begins in Paris, on Montmartre in 1930. At 23, he is a suave breaker of hearts and a slick cracker of safes. Suddenly, he is framed for a murder he did not commit and sentenced to prison for life—or "perpetuity" as the French, knowing their own penal system, more realistically put it. Shuffled off to French Guiana, he tries to break out nine times. On the first escape, he makes it 1,800 miles to Colombia in an open boat, staying free for eleven months before being caught and returned to the penal colony.
Over the years, other attempts come to grief more quickly. His pal's belt buckle catches noisily on the edge of a zinc roof at the key moment. An American sleeping potion administered to a guard fails to work in time. Months are spent in building a raft, piece by piece and then storing it in a grave, only to have a fellow prisoner squeal. But Papillon still has money, left from more than 10,000 underworld francs that he put in a plan, a small, polished, waterproof metal tube, harbored in his lower intestine. Papillon is also stirred by dreams of revenge as well as a longing to go straight and start a new life. Sent to solitary for two years, he performs a prison miracle: surviving without going mad. His pals smuggle extra food to him. He methodically exercises his memory while pacing his cell up to eleven hours a day to keep in shape. Finally, in 1941, Papillon escapes definitively, floating away from Devil's Island on a pair of tide-driven bags stuffed with coconuts to serve as food and floatation. End Part I, nearly all of Papillon's story covered in this book.
Total Recall. Part II is set in Venezuela. Papillon becomes an honest citizen. He marries and works variously as gold prospector, nightclub manager, fireman, bush-league dentist, commercial shrimp fisherman. More than 20 years pass. It is 1967. He is over 60 now, and down on his luck. He reads a book of prison memoirs by an Algerian-born lady ex-con named Albertine Sarrazin. Hastily, he buys 13 school notebooks. In a few months, apparently with near total recall, he scribbles Part I (1931 to 1945) in longhand and mails it to Sarrazin's editors in Paris. Called Papillon (what else?) and barely touched by an editor's pencil, it sells 1,000,000 copies in France, setting a new French record. It is sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club in the U.S. (this November's selection) and, at an estimated $1,000,000, is contracted for the largest first printing in Pocket Books' history (close to 3,000,000 copies). It is a Reader's Digest Condensed Book for the fall. Film rights are bought for more than $500,000. Papillon has become a light industry.