In Defence of Papillon

It was 1976, or maybe 1977, during a hated French lesson, that Ajay, sitting behind me in class, tapped me on the back and muttered out loud, “How can one man write so much?” I turned to see him holding up a dog-eared and obviously much-read paperback, one of the thickest books I had ever seen. It had a fascinating cover: a butterfly resting on a padlock, above the image the title ‘Papillon’ and the name ‘Henri Charrière.’

At least that was how I remember my first encounter with the book. Maybe it happened that way, maybe it didn’t. Personal memory can be a tricky thing, and literary memoirs more so, more often than not self-serving narratives, full of omissions, evasions, self-deceptions, half-truths, and sometimes downright lies. And Papillon was indeed a memoir, of Henri Charrière’s time in the hellish French penal colony of St Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana, South America, where he had been sent never to return after being convicted of murder in 1931 – a murder, he says, he did not commit.

Strangely, I have no memory of where or when I first read Papillon. I expect I borrowed it from a local library. But what an unforgettable book! Written in direct and electrifying prose, the reader is pulled in from the very first page as Henri Charrière begins his 14-year story of incarceration, of the casual brutality of the guards and other prisoners, of the executions, of his refusal to be broken, of his never-diminishing desire to escape, to one day live again as a free man – his story, almost mythic, a thrilling testament to human willpower, endurance, and the desire for freedom.

In 1968, Charrière scrawled Papillon across 13 notebooks in just three months and sent the manuscript to Parisian publisher Robert Laffont. Published the following year, it became an instant phenomenon, selling 1.5 million copies in France and prompting the government to pardon Charrière, allowing him to return from Venezuela to bask in his newfound fame.

But the myth unravelled quickly. Journalists unearthed a far less glamorous truth: Charrière, once a police informant and pimp, had fabricated much of his story. He’d never been held on the infamous Devil’s Island, which housed political prisoners, and his prison record revealed more obedience than escapades. What remains clear is his path to Venezuela in the 1940s, a brief stint in prison, and a quiet life thereafter as a restaurateur, husband, and father.

None of this dimmed Papillon’s brilliance or hindered its success. In 1970, it appeared in English, deftly translated by novelist Patrick O’Brian, later renowned for his Aubrey-Maturin series - and himself an expert in reinvention, often claiming Irish roots he did not possess. The book became Europe’s best-selling title, buoyed by glowing reviews and two film adaptations, in 1973 and 2017. With 13 million copies sold in 30 languages, Papillon endures as a literary phenomenon, hailed by some as the best book they’ve ever read. Charrière, however, did not live long to savor its success, succumbing to throat cancer in 1973.

Years later, the publisher Robert Laffont confessed that Papillon had been pitched as fiction, but he had insisted on marketing it as a memoir. Meanwhile, Charles Brunier, an ex-con with a butterfly tattoo—papillon being French for butterfly—claimed the nickname and much of the story as his own. Others pointed to striking parallels between Papillon and Dry Guillotine, a 1938 bestseller by René Belbenoît, who had served time in the same French Guiana prison system and even crossed paths with Charrière. The line between fact and fiction blurred further, but the legend of Papillon only grew.

As I think back to my own memory of how I first encountered Papillon, my schoolfriend muttering, “How can one man write so much?” – did it really happen that way? Was it really Ajay who first showed me the book? – I do not worry so much. Whether it was Charrière’s own memories or indeed the memories of others that poured out of him like white-hot lava for three months, Papillon remains for me an astonishing and magical book. I am truly glad one man could write so much. It deserves to be on everyone’s bookshelf, dare I say it, alongside The Odyssey, The Ramayana, The Bible, The Lord of the Rings.

(The author is a novelist with an abiding passion for Chinese history)