SallyRand

You do realize that the story of Henri Charrière, otherwise known as "Papillon" has been generally discredited as.....well.....fraud, don't you?

http://rekhabloge.blogspot.com/2010/...e-memoirs.html

From the citation:

"Papillon is a memoir written by convicted felon, Henri Charrière, in which he related the tale of his adventures in various prisons and penal colonies throughout French Guiana and its environs. The book was a runaway bestseller when it was released in France in 1969, was translated into over 15 languages, and was made into a 1973 movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.

When Charrière shopped the book, it was intended as a novel, but he was convinced to sell it as a personal memoir by his publisher, Robert Laffont. Nevertheless, Charrière insisted to the public that the entire book was true for the rest of his life. In a narrative brimming with self-importance, Charrière maintained that he was wrongfully convicted of killing a friend, sentenced to hard labour, and that he had a series of escapes and recaptures before being sent to the Devil?s Island Penal Colony.

On Devil?s Island, the butterfly-tattooed convict maintained the he made yet another daring escape on a raft made of coconuts. After this escape, he claimed he had been sent to a Venezuelan detention camp before being pardoned and becoming a Venezuelan citizen. Among his claims, were the assertions that he had stabbed a snitch in prison, lived among natives where he had married and impregnated two teenage sisters, and that, after being recaptured, he had convinced a judge to reduce his sentence because they hadn?t hit the prison guards that hard when they had escaped.

So what was true? Henri Charrière had been convicted of killing a friend, he had escaped from the French Penal Colony in French Guiana, he had been sent to solitary on the island of St. Joseph, and he had eventually escaped to Venezuela after being transferred back to the mainland. The rest of the story was embellished with the accounts of other prisoners and with fantasy from Charrière?s fertile imagination. There is no reason to believe that Charrière was innocent, his first escape was closer to a year than a week after his imprisonment, and many of the excessive rules and conditions Charrière described had been abolished before his arrival. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Charrière had ever even been on Devil?s Island as it was reserved for those convicted for treason, and, even if he had been on Devil?s Island, this French MacGyver never escaped on a coconut raft.

Fellow inmates and prison records attested to the fact that, contrary to his portrayal of himself, Charrière was a rather quiet and submissive prisoner who caused few problems. Already in 1970, the claims of Papillon were overturned by Gérard de Villiers in Papillon Egpinglé (Butterfly Pinned). Charrière vehemently denied de Villiers? claims, even trying to have his book banned. Still, if internet articles are any indication, there are those who continue to believe the events described in Papillon are gospel."

Read it and wep!

Sally.