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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." Two books are written attacking Papillon. One claims the author was not really much of a safecracker after all. The other suggests that his book is full of errors. "I didn't go into that hell with a typewriter," snaps Papillon. Then he is off for America, where this week his book is being published with some fanfare.
How Papillon will fare in the New World is not entirely clear. Its author will surely grow richer and more famous, but he may not be read so avidly as he was in France. As a man he seems both hard to dislike or profoundly distrust. But his story often seems too good to be true, and raises the question of just how much Sunday supplemental escapee-from-Devil's Island experience he has incorporated as his own. For example, on one cavale (escape) he gets help from an island full of lepers, and when one hands him some coffee, a whole diseased finger comes off and sticks to the bowl.
Thrilling adventure tales are to a large extent translation-proof. But the French colloquially use words like noble and ignoble that in English (and in a rather stodgy translation, too) sometimes make Papillon sound a little like The Rover Boys on Land and Sea. Perhaps more important, the kind of sympathy for Papillon that helped the book so much in France is based on a peculiarly Gallic preoccupation with justice miscarried. For years, France has treated men charged with crimes as guilty until proved innocent, and generally looked upon prison as a place that prisoners should either not survive or, failing that, be taught never to risk entering again. Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean —sentenced in perpetuity as the result of a petty theft, remorselessly pursued by the forces of the law, redeeming himself by acts of courage and charity—is a French epic hero. Alfred Dreyfus is his counterpart in the real world of politics and treason. Few American readers will feel Gallic tremors of empathy when Papillon sits on Dreyfus' very bench as he plots escape from Devil's Island, or when, in a Hugo-like episode, he risks his life trying to save a warden's tiny daughter fallen among sharks.
Pimps and Pirates. What will be going for Papillon in the U.S. is its strain of fashionable neoRomanticism. Particularly when extolling the simplicity of the Indians with whom he lived for more than six months in 1934, Papillon offers Rousseauesque passages damning society and praising the noble savage. Indeed, the book is profoundly optimistic about human nature. Its pages are crowded with pimps, pirates and murderers. But, except for those who cruelly serve the prison system, they live in a subsociety marked by a degree of order and a scrupulousness that often goes far enough beyond "honor among thieves" to be of interest to, say, Konrad Lorenz.