Virginie Troussier, on the drama of the pillar of Fraêney: "It was not my story, but I think it became"

On July 11, 1961, seven mountaineers, four French and three Italians, left to try the first ascent of the pillar of Fraêney in the Dumont-Blanc massif.Caught in the storm for five days and five nights, four will notre.

© Éditions Guérin / Paulsen

The first ascent of the pillar of Fraêney, one of the greatest dramas in the history of mountaineering, adéfrained the chronicle at the time and has been the subject of numerous stories since.Why did you wish to approach it?

This story, I have known her for a long time, like the literature that talks about it, since I work for the Magazine mountain book page.Writing this book was not my idea, but that of Charlie Buffet, my publisher at Guérin who came to get me.But I was very chilly and I almost refused, because the story had been told by the protagonists themselves.

What more can be said ?I was not to get there, nor to be up.Charlie Buffet had the eye and the flair of a good publisher guiding me to merge my way of writing on the mountain and those who travel it, and the history of Fraêney. J’ai alors voulu me relier intimement àl'histoire et écrire avec la matière, le froid, la neige, la foudre. Et puis il y avait un élément pour enrichirmon histoire qui était que Pierre Mazeaud est toujours en vie et que j’ai pu lerencontrer.

How does he live with this loss, 60 years later?Is it all in him?What is the loss in the mountains, mourning?This is from itmatic that I wanted to explore.And finally, Charlie also entrusted me with interviews he had had with Walter Bonatti about Fraêney.With this matter, I embarked on a sort of investigation by meeting people who were able to know Bonatti, Desgens who lived in Chamonix at the time of the facts, or the girlfriend Derobert Guillaume, I read the whole press of the press'era, and I went to the scene, in the southern face of Mont Blanc.

I immersed myself in this atmosphere, this story, I lived with these characters, and very quickly and I no longer wanted to leave them.Until the publication and the first returns, I was very anxious, worried, especially for what was my legitimacy.Because I do not have the level to make the ascent inquests!

Pierremazeaud dubbed you after reading your text, a very beautiful enthusiastic video.It is in itself already a performance!

I really like this man that I had been said to be very inclusive, which is immediately verified.By crossing the landing of his door, I felt that he is a person on whom we can count, who is not there to tell stories and quickly identifies his interlocutors.Ensessing at his office he also told me, right in the eyes: "Frankly, why do you write elsewhere?"Everything has already been said !I do not see the interest, you were not pas with us ”...It poses an atmosphere (laughs).

I feared his reading, and his return arrived on the day of the publication of the book with this video which acracled on the internet.Her words made me very happy and have a lot.I realized that a book was truly finished with the return of readers.Beyond an extraordinary story, and more generally, I have the impression that readers seem to have welcomed the writer, the experience of language, of literature.The return that they see beyond the facts.By reading, something other soda and unfolds...I am very happy, my confidence in words was not in vain.

Cetexte, breathless, sensitive, carnal and psychic, is also a declaration of the mountain in the mountains. Quelle est lanature de votre lien avec elle ?

The mountain, I'm coming.My experienced grandfather, read a lot on the subject.It was his whole life, as for the father father.And, if I did a lot of skiing and mountain, I also have a joureu desire to leave it.I knew her too much, I needed to discover things.

So I went to live in Paris, magnetized by its history and artistic history.Leaving the mountain, I learned from the watchtow another way to get closer to it.I miss she, I’m going back to it regularly.Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, who lived in the Vaudois mountains before living in Paris said: "It was by moving away from her that I managed to better launch.»It's a bit of my story.

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The mountain is of course tradition and a culture, but I probably come back to it more for the beauty of places that I wanted to transmit in my book.This story is that of a race that turns badly, and we must continue to live.We talked about Detragédie, of drama, but the ramifications also interested me a lot: why these guys continued to return to the mountains to explore it? The answer seems to me: friendship, the links that are tied, develop, develop.As at sea, there is something strong that happens there.She reveals to us and we shape.And then there is the physical effort in a majestic place, Lafusion of the two comes to seek me in something raw, intimate and instinctive.

Is it a very romantic vision of human relationships in the mountains?Many of it exist, and they regularly hit the column, with purple the last episodes at K2.

There are of course drifts.Bonatti very experienced them, that is why he stopped after the northern face of the Matterhorn, seeing the competitive spirit dawn.For him, the mountain was an exercisespiritual, a way of knowing each other, of drawing to see what he was.By reading mountains of a life, we realize that he is full of very rich philosophical teaching.

Poupierre Mazeaud, it was something else.Unlike Bonatti, a guide-professional, he was a crazy and very technically good lover, who left Paris evening of Paris, after a hard work week, swallowed the kilometers to go to Chamonix, walked the mountains all weekend and returned on SundaysTo start a new week again from 6 a.m.!This passion, I also want to have it always.

The mountain makes us alive, something intensifies with it, contacts, steps, looks and links!If there will be competition drifts and first, I have the impression that this ascension of the pillar of the asny, the mystery that they had left Autourd ’before leaving, all this was mainly part of a game.

We see surrounded by the virus, by exploding cases, a situation which is anxiety -provoking.By reading this book and all the risks that these seven climbers have taken to live, but above all survive, we are seized by a devacuity form of our lives, obsessed with our own death.

On Cesujet too, that of death, the mountain teaches us another way of looking at?

It was very important for me to talk about death, because I have always written against forgetting and the losses that obdem me and meterroze.I wanted to write a living book with all these missing.Anyway, we can completely be dead and present, the absence is also a great presence.The mountain dies do not actually die, they are not in a tomb, they are on the summits.

In the mountains, there is always a risk, wave to take it or not.If I make the link with the COVVID, we take so much depreciation, so many fundamental things are avoided for a formity form, which makes the current situation very difficult to understand.I don't accept, I suffer it.To stay too much on guard, do we not lose the legacy of existence?

To come back to Pierre Mazeaud, the lastprotagonist of this still alive story, he told me that he lost his Camamarades but that he felt a form of joy by thinking that they were on which they would have liked to die.Young and joyful, these are the images that remain in him, when he undergoes old age.I like his way of being active in history, not to undergo things.

In the last chapter, pain and joy, I wanted to show the pain of loss, but also that one could reverse the Leschoses.The title of the book, in the middle of the summer, an invincible winter, is a nod to the text drawn from the wedding of Albert Camus: "In the middle of winter, I discovered me an invincible summer".What he meant is that although if it is if it is illustrated, there is always a flame, another deeper dimension that we have to go and get.The stories are never happy oumal, they are what we do with it.

Comments in such a book, after having rubbed shoulders with people of this caliber? What has changed in you?

At the end of a book, we always win something, and I thought a lot about this idea of living while being alive.Like these septalpinists.Their desire, their passion, their ardor, I now want to develop all the time and keep in me the personalities they had.I want to live a little in this way.

They were companions of life for two years, I have pictures of them around my office and for me are still alive.Their photos make me forget the drama and the tragedy, even if the tears are mounted by working the text.I will always think of them and will make a pilgrimage on the side of the innominata edge every summer.

I also take care of my friendships.I'm also going to see Mazeaud again of the mountain.It was not my story, but I think she became it.

Lapostface of the immense Italian writer Dino Buzzati is in fact the penultimate book of the book.Why this text inserted in yours, and which revives the discomfort felt Water Bonatti to whom we have greatly criticized for living?

It is still an idea of Charlie Buffet, a masterful way of talking about the controversy that I did not want to mention.Pierre Mazeaud had said to me: "If we think of the mountain in terms of controversy we did not understand the freedom that Lamontagne allows us, because it is first of all a space of freedom and not depolemic.»»

You have to imagine the drama that Bonatti has experienced in his retouren Italy.He came back from a terrible test, he had pulled the group almost all alone and had out.Among the four dead, there was Andrea Oggioni, his brother's brother with whom he had explored the Alps and the Andes.And he could not attend his funeral, the family of the deceased put him outside this day!

The text of Buzzati is perfect because it settles the controversy Etsiretout, it says in hollow: "would it be a little more bonatti and oggioni on earth.Let's look at us. Est-ce qu'il y en a ? Très peu, et pourtant cela ferait dubien !»» Aujourd’hui, dans notre époque, je pense aussi qu’ilsnous manquent.

Why ?

Because they were people who took Desrisques, who were very honest, honest, sensitive to friendship and aux -men.And above all, they followed their instinct.They were great guys, who were doing things.I think that's what we miss today.There was a desire to live fully, passionately.We are missing their passion.

We talk about it a lot today, passion, if not that networks: #Passion #Anture #Explorer.But I tell myself that, with passionate people, I don't know if there is that much.This word is overused and we lack people ready to a lot to satisfy something that comes from yellows.And also, who talk about it little.Knowledge of self and the other goes through a gesture, a look, a flexibility, ellipses.

In the middle of summer, an invincible winter, Virginie Troussier, Guérin / Paulsen editions, January 2021, 128 p., € 19.90