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The soundness of Mauriac's words can be seen not only from the immense quantities of hopeless manuscripts by other exprisoners (purple characters, but untouched by genius) that flow into publishers' offices every week, but also by the baldness of the following summary that is intended to put the reader of this second volume into the picture: the main facts are here, but I am the first to admit that the heart of the matter is lacking. "It is utterly fascinating reading… This new colleague of ours is a master!" And he pointed out that it was not enough to have been a transported convict and to have escaped again and again extraordinary talent was required to give the book its ring of truth and to make its value "exactly proportional to its immense success." "This is a literary prodigy," said François Mauriac. They were all deeply moved by the burning sense of injustice that runs right through the book and that gives it its coherence and validity, but even more by Papillon's sheer narrative power, his innate genius for telling a story. That was in 1970, the year of the _phénomene Papillon_, a phenomenon almost unparalleled in the annals of publishing: it was not only that an extraordinary number of people read the book (850,000 copies were sold in the first few months), but that the readers embraced the whole spectrum of literary opinion, from the Académie Française to those whose lips moved slowly as they made their fascinated way through the strange adventures of an indomitable man struggling against the society that had sent him to rot in the infamous tropical prisons of Guiana with a life sentence for a murder that he had never committed. He had no great opinion of himself as an author and he was quite willing to have it improved, cut about and put into "good French" but the first publisher he sent it to happened to employ a brilliant editor who at once realized the exceptional quality of the manuscript and who delivered it to an astonished public in its original state, merely tidying up the punctuation, the spelling and a very few points of style. Middle-aged, impoverished by an earthquake and worried about his future, Henri Charrière sat down to write a book to restore his fortunes: it was his first, and he called it _Papillon_, the name by which he had been known in the underworld of Paris and in the French penal settlements. Alex Guibert-Germain, to Madame Alex Guibert-Germain, to my countrymen, the Venezuelans, to my French, Spanish, Swiss, Belgian, Italian, Yugoslav, German, English, Greek, American, Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, Israeli, Swedish, Czechoslovak, Danish, Argentine, Colombian, and Brazilian friends, and all those friends who are faceless but who have done me the honor of writing to me.
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Translated from the French by Patrick O'Brien Henri Charriere died in 1973 at the age of 66.īanco: the Further Adventures of Papillon He also runs night-clubs in Caracas until an earthquake ruins him in 1967 – when he decides to write the book that brings him international fame. Despite his resolve to become an honest man, Charriere is soon involved in hair-raising exploits with goldminers, gamblers, bank-robbers and revolutionaries – robbing and being robbed, his lust for life as strong as ever. "Banco" continues the adventures of Henri Charriere – nicknamed 'Papillon' – in Venezuela, where he has finally won his freedom after thirteen years of escape and imprisonment. Here at last is the sensational sequel to "Papillon" – the great story of escape and adventure that took the world by storm. Genre: thriller Banco: the Further Adventures of Papillon Henri Charrière