Papillon

Henri Charrière, a 25-year-old from the Ardèche region of southern France, was convicted on October 26, 1931, of murdering a pimp named Roland le Petit in Paris's Montmartre district, a crime he insists he did not commit. The prosecution's case rested on the testimony of a witness named Polein, whom Charrière believed was coerced by police. Sentenced to hard labor for life, Charrière, known by his nickname "Papillon" (French for "butterfly," after the tattoo on his chest), began plotting escape from the first night in his cell at the Conciergerie prison.

At the Conciergerie, Charrière forged a pact with Louis Dega, a wealthy forger from Marseilles sentenced to 15 years: Charrière would provide physical protection in exchange for Dega's financial resources. He also received a plan, a small metal cylinder containing money that he concealed inside his body. After brutal conditions at the transit prison in Caen, he was transferred to the fortress of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, where he took custody of a second plan belonging to Ignace Galgani, a fellow convict too frightened to carry it himself. Nearly 2,000 convicts awaited deportation aboard the ship La Martinière to French Guiana, where France maintained its forced-labor penal colonies, collectively known as the bagne.

Arriving at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, the administrative center of the bagne, in 1933, Charrière learned he was classified as an internee destined for the Iles du Salut, three small islands from which escape was considered nearly impossible. He bribed his way into the hospital and recruited two partners: Joanes Clousiot, a fellow internee, and Maturette, a teenager reprieved from a death sentence. On November 27, 1933, the three knocked out their guards, scaled the hospital wall, and fled down the Maroni River. When the boat proved unseaworthy, they received help from residents of the Ile aux Pigeons, a colony for people with leprosy. The residents sold them a sturdy sailboat and supplied provisions, navigational advice, and medical supplies.

The fugitives endured 13 days at sea, surviving a hurricane before landing at Trinidad, where Mr. Bowen, a lawyer, and his family took them in with remarkable trust. British authorities allowed them free movement for 18 days, repaired their boat, and provided a compass and map. This experience transformed Charrière; he describes it as a restoration of dignity after years of dehumanization. They sailed next to Curaçao, where Bishop Irénée de Bruyne heard Charrière's confession and arranged for a confiscated smuggler's boat, urging him to abandon his fantasies of revenge.

Sailing toward Colombia, Charrière dropped off three French relégués (repeat offenders sentenced to colonial exile) entrusted to his care in Trinidad. His boat was becalmed and seized by Colombian authorities at Rio Hacha. After escaping prison with a Colombian smuggler named Antonio, Charrière reached the Guajiro Indians and was adopted by a coastal tribe led by Chief Zato. For over six months he lived among them, marrying two women, Lali and Zoraima, diving for pearls, and finding a peace he had never known. Both wives became pregnant, yet his obsession with returning to civilization drove him to leave.

Recaptured near Santa Marta, Charrière was thrown into an underwater dungeon that flooded twice daily. The Belgian consul, Klausen, secured his release after 28 days, and Charrière reunited with his French companions. After failed escape attempts from Santa Marta, the group was transferred to Barranquilla, where Charrière tried four more times: a chapel revolt, drugging a wall guard, scaling the wall, and detonating dynamite. Each attempt failed. On October 30, 1934, French guards arrived to extradite the prisoners back to French Guiana.

Back at the bagne, a military tribunal sentenced Charrière to two years in solitary confinement at the Réclusion on the Ile Saint-Joseph, a facility the convicts called la mangeuse d'hommes (the devourer of men). Cells were kept in total darkness with absolute silence enforced. To endure the isolation, Charrière wrapped his blanket around his head to induce a semi-conscious state that launched vivid mental voyages into his past. Dega and Galgani secretly supplied him with a daily coconut and cigarettes through bribed intermediaries for nearly a year, until the courier was discovered and beaten to death. Deprived of his evening meal for four months, Charrière barely survived. Clousiot, gravely weakened, died shortly after release.

Charrière settled into life on Ile Royale, where convicts maintained an elaborate black-market economy. Over four months, he secretly built a sectional raft, hiding pieces in a grave in the guards' cemetery. A convict named Bébert Celier betrayed the plan, and Charrière killed Celier in a knife fight, receiving eight years in solitary: three for the escape attempt and five for the killing. During this second stretch, a reformist doctor named Germain Guibert introduced daily swimming and medical examinations in sunlight. After 20 months, Charrière dove into shark-infested waters to rescue a guard's drowning daughter; though a boat reached the girl first, the act earned him a suspension of his sentence.

Returning to communal life, Charrière witnessed more violence, including the murder of his friend Matthieu Carbonieri. He faked madness to gain admission to the island's lunatic asylum, where Roméo Salvidia, an Italian convict working as an orderly, had prepared two barrels lashed together as a raft. They launched at night in a storm, but waves smashed the barrels against the rocks. Charrière was thrown back to shore. Salvidia's body was found six days later.

Transferred to Devil's Island (Ile du Diable), the smallest of the three Iles du Salut, Charrière sat on Dreyfus' bench, the stone seat where Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army officer wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, once gazed toward France. Studying the wave patterns, Charrière discovered that every seventh wave was a massive ground swell he named "Lisette." He confirmed through tests that objects thrown into its retreating surge were carried safely out to sea. He recruited a fellow convict named Sylvain, and with the help of a Chinese convict named Chang, they prepared two coconut-filled sack rafts.

On a moonlit night, they threw themselves into Lisette's retreating surge and were swept out to sea. After more than 40 hours adrift, they approached Grande Terre, the mainland. Sylvain fatally stepped off his raft into quicksand and disappeared beneath a wave as Charrière watched helplessly. A final breaker hurled Charrière into the trees at the jungle's edge.

Aided by a woodcutter named Jean, Charrière made contact with Cuic-Cuic, Chang's brother, and bought a boat. He sailed from the Kourou River with Cuic-Cuic and Van Hue, a one-armed Chinese convict. After seven days, a British torpedo boat directed them to Georgetown, British Guiana. Charrière then sailed with four other Frenchmen toward Venezuela, surviving a typhoon that destroyed their mast and supplies. They beached at the fishing village of Irapa, where impoverished villagers nursed them back to health, sharing food and clothing despite having little themselves.

Venezuelan police sent Charrière, without trial, to El Dorado, a brutal penal colony on a river island. A 1945 revolution brought new authorities who investigated conditions at the camp. On October 18, 1945, 14 years after his conviction, Charrière received an identity card designating him a legal resident of Venezuela. He reflects that his long journey has finally ended, resolving to prove through honest living that he deserves the freedom Venezuela has granted him.