The year after Saussure and Bourrit had failed to capture Mont Blanc, Paccard’s diary, even drier than usual, contained the following entry: ‘Our journey of the 8th of August, 1786; arrived six hours twenty-three minutes; set out six hours fifty-seven minutes; rested thirty-four minutes.’1 Fleshed out, this skeletal account could be interpreted thus: at 4.00 a.m. on 7 August, Paccard and a local guide named Jacques Balmat had set out from Chamonix; after a climb of more than thirty-six hours during which they fought gales, altitude sickness and snow blindness they reached, at 6.23 p.m. the following day, the summit of Mont Blanc which they then left at 6.57 p.m. The impossible had been accomplished.
At the heart of the climb was Balmat, a short, boastful farmer-cum-crystal-gatherer. He was not particularly pleasant and had a twisty cast to his face, but he was supremely fit and was as determined as any of his more illustrious employers to reach the summit -and, importantly, to earn Saussure’s reward. ‘In those days I really was something worth looking at,’ he recalled. ‘I had a famous calf and a stomach like cast-iron, and I could walk three days consecutively without eating, a fact I found useful to me when lost on the Buet. I munched a little snow - nothing more. Every now and then I cast a sidelong look at Mont Blanc and said to myself, “My fine fellow, whatever you may say or whatever you may do, I shall get to the top of you one day.’”2
Climbing the Brévent repeatedly to get a good view of Mont Blanc’s slopes, he saw a possible way to the top. It led via the village of La Côte, through the Glacier de Taconnaz to the rocky outcrops known as the Grands Mulets and thence to the snowy mound of the Dôme du Goûter. From here, he hoped, a sudden lunge might capture the summit itself.
Balmat trained for every possible difficulty to such a degree that he dreamed of nothing else. ‘I would plant my feet on pieces of rock and feel them shake like loose teeth,’ he wrote, ‘and the sweat would fall from me in great drops … Never mind, keep going! I was like a lizard on a wall. I saw the earth sinking away beneath me. It was all the same, I only looked at the sky. All I cared for was to reach the top … At that moment I was awakened by a vigorous box to the ear by my wife, and, would you believe it, I had caught hold of her ear and was tugging it as if it were indiarubber.’
Finally, on 5 June 1786, he put his dreams and his plans to the test. Telling his wife that he was going after crystals and would be back within two days - secrecy was essential, he decided, lest competitors steal the fruits of his reconnaissance - he reached the Grands Mulets without mishap. Here he was prevented from spying the ground ahead thanks to a cloud that enveloped both the peak and himself. Undeterred, Balmat then did the unheard of: he decided to spend the night where he was. Lacking as he did a tent, and provisioned with only a loaf of bread and a bottle of brandy, his decision would be considered foolhardy by any standards. By those of the time, it was unimaginable folly. Nobody had ever spent a night in the open at such high altitude. It was widely believed that any who did so would die.
Balmat’s chosen resting place was a little perch of hard snow, about six feet long, surrounded by rocks. A few feet away yawned an 800-foot drop. For fear of rolling down the cliff in his sleep, Balmat remained awake, seated on his knapsack, beating his hands and feet together to combat the cold. Shortly before midnight, the mist turned to snow. ‘My breath was frozen,’ he recalled, ‘and my clothes were soaked … soon I felt as if I was stark naked. I moved my hands and feet faster, and began to sing to drive away the thoughts that were seething in my brain.’ His voice died away in the whiteness. There was no echo. ‘Everything was dead in this ice-bound world and the sound of my voice almost terrified me. I became silent and afraid.’
At 2.00 a.m. the sky grew lighter and by 4.00 Balmat was confident that he had survived. (Though it would be more than twenty-four hours before his clothes thawed.) He spent another day and yet another numbing night on the mountain before deciding to go back. On the way down, however, he was horrified to meet a party of three guides coming up. Ostensibly they were looking for lost goats; but Balmat knew better. ‘I felt that the men were trying to deceive, and at once surmised that they were about to attempt the journey which I had just failed to achieve.’ And, if they were successful they would gain the reward. When they asked him what conditions were like higher up, his suspicions were confirmed. By now, Balmat had been climbing more or less continually for two days, but the prospect of being outstripped by the fresher men was more than he could bear. When they asked him to join them he accepted immediately. There was one problem: Balmat had promised his wife he would be back within two days. In an extraordinary display of vigour he therefore ran down to Chamonix, told his wife that he was back and then, having grabbed some food and a change of socks, told her he was off again.
He left his home at 11.00 p.m. and two hours later had caught up with the others. By 3.00 a.m. the whole party was standing on the Dôme du Goûter from where, in the early dawn, they could see the summit of Mont Blanc to the east. Here, the throng was swelled by yet another group of two guides. Their excuse that they had decided to climb to the Dôme for a wager was more than Balmat could stomach. Aghast at the prospect of having to share the reward with so many, he set out on his own and within a few hours was sitting astride a narrow ridge or arête leading to the summit. It ‘seemed a path fit only for a rope dancer’ and was interrupted by an ugly clump of rocks but, looking down, Balmat thought he could discern a route over the glacier below - the so-called Grand Plateau. Unfortunately, he was in no position to make the journey. He was starved of sleep, he had run out of provisions, and the weather was deteriorating. He had no choice but to retreat.
On reaching the Dôme he discovered that the others, too, had given up. They had gone home, expecting Balmat to follow. Rather than do so, however, he spent the rest of the day criss-crossing the Grand Plateau. That night he again slept uneasily on the mountainside. Thousands of feet below him, he could see the lights of Chamonix being extinguished one by one. It did little to raise his spirits. ‘No man is made of iron,’ he admitted, ‘and I felt far from cheerful. During the short intervals between the crash of avalanches I heard distinctly the barking of a dog at Courmayeur [on the Italian side of Mont Blanc] though it was more than a league and a half to that village from the spot where I was lying. The noise served to distract my thoughts, for it was the only earthly sound that reached me. At about midnight the barking ceased, and nothing remained but the deathly silence of the grave.’ Glaciers continued to crack explosively and avalanches to rumble, but they ‘could reassure no human being, they could only frighten him’.
At 2.00 a.m. he awoke and began his descent. He reached home six hours later, badly sunburned and utterly exhausted. Rejecting his bedroom - ‘I was afraid of being tormented by the flies’ - he went into the barn and stretched out on a pile of hay where he slept for twenty-four hours. In all, his odyssey had taken the better part of five days during which he had slept, minimally, for only two nights. He had covered incredible vertical distances at an astonishing rate -his second ascent must have been at a run, even allowing for an exaggeration of his times. He had proved that it was possible to survive a night in the open at very high altitude and, above all, he had found a route to the summit. It really was an amazing achievement and if it yielded no immediate profit Balmat did not care. ‘I was despondent, but not disheartened by these two vain attempts,’ he recorded. ‘I felt quite certain I should be more fortunate a third time.’
For three weeks Mont Blanc was shrouded in cloud. This was no use to Balmat. The clouds which looked so innocuous from below contained driving snow and sleet which even his constitution could not endure for long. Equally important, they meant that observers would be unable to see people on the summit. It was all very well to reach the top but it would be pointless to do so unless the conquest could be verified by telescope from below. And there was another thing: Balmat had to find a respectable person to climb with. Even if he reached the summit and turned somersaults in the full view of 1,000 spectators, it would be considered valueless without a man of science to hand with his barometer. Where could one find such a man in Chamonix? At the door of that silent, critical chronicler Dr Michel-Gabriel Paccard.
Paccard had been peering vainly at Mont Blanc through his telescope for more than three years in search of a route to the summit. When Jacques Balmat approached him with the news of his discovery - also for advice about his sunburn - and the offer of making a joint attempt, Paccard did not hesitate. They agreed to start as soon as the weather cleared. The clouds dissipated in the early hours of 8 August 1786, leaving Mont Blanc outlined in all its glory. Balmat was at Paccard’s house before dawn.
In 1832 the novelist Alexandre Dumas was to visit Balmat and persuade him to give his version of what happened next. The resulting narrative owed much to Balmat’s sense of self-importance, a great deal to Dumas’s journalistic skills and even more to his interviewing technique - he paid for, and Balmat consumed, three bottles of wine -but even so it is worth repeating because it remains the only detailed description of the historic climb.
I went to Paccard and said, ‘Well, Doctor, are you determined? Are you afraid of the cold or the snow or the precipices? Speak out like a man.’ ‘With you I fear nothing,’ was his reply. ‘Well then, the time has come to climb this molehill.’ The Doctor said he was quite ready, but just as he shut the door of his house I think his heart failed him a little, for he could not get the key out of the lock and kept turning it first one way and then the other. ‘I say, Balmat,’ he said, ‘if we did the right thing we should take two guides.’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘either you and I go together, or you go with the others. I want to be first not second.’ He thought for a moment, drew out the key, put it in his pocket, and with his head bent down followed me mechanically. In about a minute he gave himself a shake and said, ‘Well, I must trust to you, Balmat.’… He tried, but could not sing in tune, which annoyed him.
They set off at 5.00 p.m., taking separate routes so as to avoid drawing attention to themselves, and met up again at the village of La Côte. ‘The same evening we slept on the top of La Côte, between the glaciers of Bossons and Taconnaz. I carried a rug and used it to muffle the Doctor up like a baby. Thanks to this precaution he passed a tolerable night. As for me I slept soundly until half past one. At two the white line appeared, and soon the sun rose without a cloud, brilliant and beautiful, a promise of a glorious day! I awoke the Doctor and we began our day’s march.’
After quarter of an hour they were crossing the Glacier de Taconnaz, surmounting crevasses ‘whose depth could not be measured by the eye’ and snow bridges that ‘gave way under our feet’. ‘The Doctor’s first steps were halting and uncertain,’ Balmat recorded, ‘but the sight of my alertness gave him confidence, and we went on safe and sound.’ Up they went to the Grands Mulets where once again Paccard’s confidence waned as Balmat showed him where he had spent the night. ‘He made an expressive grimace, and kept silent for ten minutes; then, stopping suddenly, said, “Balmat, do you really think we shall get to the top of Mont Blanc today?” I saw how his thoughts were drifting, and answered him laughingly’ At the projecting rocks known as the Petits Mulets the wind rose and Paccard’s hat was snatched off his head.
I turned on hearing his cry, and saw the felt hat careering over the mountain to Courmayeur. With his arms stretched out he looked after it. ‘We must go into mourning for it,’ I said, ‘you will never see it again for it has gone to Piedmont, and good luck be with it.’ It seemed my little joke had given offence to the wind, for my mouth had scarcely closed when a more violent gust obliged us to lie down on out stomachs to prevent our following the hat. The wind lashed the mountain sides and passed whistling over our heads, driving great balls of snow almost as big as houses before it. The Doctor was dismayed … At the first respite I rose, but the Doctor could only continue on all fours.
At the Dôme du Goûter, Balmat took out his telescope and looked back at the town below. He had arranged with a shop woman to look out for them at this point and, sure enough, there she was with fifty others. Balmat waved his hat and the villagers waved back. But the hatless Paccard, who had finally stood up thanks to ‘considerations of self respect’, could only be distinguished by his big coat.
At this point Paccard’s nerve seems to have gone altogether, if Balmat is to be believed.
Having used up all his strength in getting on his feet, neither the encouragement from below, nor my earnest entreaties could induce him to continue the ascent. My eloquence exhausted, I told him to keep moving so as not to get benumbed. He listened, without seeming to understand, and replied, ‘All right.’ I saw that he was suffering from the cold, while I also was nearly frozen. Leaving him the bottle, I went on alone, saying that I should very soon come back to find him. He answered, ‘Yes! Yes!’ and telling him again to be sure not to stand still, I went off. I had hardly gone thirty paces when, on turning round, I saw him actually sitting down on the snow, with his back turned to the wind as some precaution.
From that time onward the route presented no very great difficulty, but as I rose higher the air became much less easy to breathe, and I had to stop almost every ten steps and wheeze like one with consumption. I felt as if my lungs had gone, and my chest was quite empty. I folded my handkerchief over my mouth, which made me a little more comfortable as I breathed through it. The cold got worse and worse, and to go a quarter of a league took an hour. I kept walking upward, with my head bent down, but finding I was on a peak which was new to me, I lifted my head and saw that at last I had reached the summit of Mont Blanc!
I had no longer any strength to go higher; the muscles of my legs seemed only held together by my trousers. But behold I was at the end of my journey … I had come alone with no help but my own will and my own strength. Everything around belonged to me! I was the monarch of Mont Blanc! I was the statue on this unique pedestal! Ah, then I turned towards Chamonix and waved my hat on the end of my stick. I could see through my glass the response. My subjects in the valley perceived. The whole village was gathered together in the market place.
Then Balmat remembered Paccard. He shouted for him but received no answer. Alarmed, he retraced his steps and found him rolled up in a ball, ‘just like a cat when she makes herself into a muff. Even the news that Balmat had reached the peak had no effect on him. All he said was ‘Where can I lie down and go to sleep?’ Balmat hoisted him to his feet and when he complained that his hands were cold gave him one of his hare-skin mittens - ‘I would not have parted with both of them even to my brother’ - before shoving him up to the summit which they reached shortly after 6.00 p.m.
The sun shone brilliantly and stars could be seen in the deep blue sky. Balmat, who had completely recovered from his previous fatigue, marvelled at the view.
Below was nothing but gaunt peaks, ice, rocks, and snow. The great chain which crosses the Dauphiné and stretches as far as the Tyrol was spread out before us, its four hundred glaciers shining in the sunlight. Could there be space for any green ground on the earth? The lakes of Geneva and Neuchâtel were specks of blue on the horizon. To the left lay the mountains of my dear country all fleecy with snow, and rising from meadows of the richest green. To the right was all Piedmont, and Lombardy as far as Genoa, and Italy was opposite.
They stayed there for an hour. Paccard brought out his thermometer and barometer - despite a temperature of 22°F, which caused his ink to freeze as he tried to put down the results. Then at 7.00 p.m., with only two and a half hours of daylight remaining, Balmat gave one last wave of his hat to the villagers below and, holding Paccard under the arms, began the descent. The doctor was ‘like a child, no energy or will. I guided him along the good places and pushed, or carried him, along the bad’. Every few minutes Paccard would stop, saying he could go no further, and had to be pushed on by brute force. When they crossed the snowline at eleven o’clock Paccard announced that he could no longer feel his hands.
I took off his gloves and found that his hands were dead white, and my hand also from which I had taken the glove was quite numb. I said, ‘Well, we have three frost-bitten hands between us.’ He did not mind but only wanted to lie down and sleep. He told me, however, to rub them with snow, and that was easily done. I began by rubbing his hands and finished by rubbing my own. Soon sensation returned, but accompanied by pains as if every vein had been pricked by needles. I rolled my baby up in his rug and put him to bed under the shelter of a rock; we ate and drank a little; pressed as close to one another as possible, and fell fast asleep.
The following morning Paccard was completely snow-blind. ‘It is funny, Balmat,’ he said, ‘I can hear the birds singing but can see no daylight.’ He wondered if it was because he could not open his eyes. Yet, according to Balmat, they were ‘glaring like those of a horned owl’. Paccard followed Balmat downhill, holding onto his knapsack until they reached La Côte, where Balmat hurried home, leaving the doctor to feel his way back with a stick.
When Balmat looked in a mirror he was horrified. ‘I was quite unrecognisable. My eyes were red, my face black and my lips blue. Every time I laughed or yawned the blood spouted out from my lips and cheeks, and in addition I was half blind.’ Within a week, however, he was fit enough to travel to Geneva to claim Saussure’s prize. And a month later the story of his ascent was published by the Historian of the Alps himself, the indefatigable Bourrit.
Whereas Saussure was delighted by Paccard and Balmat’s success, Bourrit was extremely jealous. In his eyes Paccard had come to public attention in the first place by accompanying the Indefatigable One up the mountain. Now the upstart had stolen his glory. And he had done so with just one guide instead of the tens that the Precentor required merely to steady him across a glacier. If Bourrit could not claim the conquest for himself he would do his best to deny it to Paccard.
Bourrit interviewed Balmat in Geneva while he ‘still carried on his face the honourable marks of his intrepidity’,3 and produced an account that broadly accorded with that of Dumas fifty-six years later. Not everything was the same: Balmat was 70 when he spoke to Dumas and was confused by old age as well as an obvious animosity towards Paccard. The humiliating scene on the Dôme du Goûter, for example, was a complete fabrication. They never went there, ascending instead via the Grand Plateau which lies beneath it. Equally, Balmat’s claim that he struggled alone to the summit while Paccard sank into hypothermic slumber is open to doubt: Paccard would have frozen to death in the estimated hour and a half it must have taken Balmat after leaving him to reach the summit, wave to his ‘subjects’ and then rejoin him; and if not dead, Paccard would have been in no condition to record the temperature let alone make observations with his barometer, which he undeniably did. Such details aside, however, the two stories bore a remarkable similarity. According to Bourrit, who published his findings in a public letter on 20 September 1786, Balmat was the hero and Paccard a feeble tagger-on. Not only had Balmat reached the top before Paccard but he had had to drag the doctor after him. In every respect Balmat had breathed life into the enterprise while Paccard had lagged behind, having to be coaxed, shoved and bullied to the summit. It was a masterful and engaging story - even if it dwelled overlong on Bourrit’s own accomplishments the year before - culminating in a typical flourish: ‘Chamonix contemplated them, strangers from below saw them through their glasses; they had followed them on their march with inquietude and they rejoiced at the sight of the two little beings upon so lofty a pinnacle of the globe.’4
There was more. In Bourrit’s view the guide had been grossly underpaid by Paccard. ‘Balmat ought to have an honest reward,’ he said, ignoring Saussure’s prize. ‘Strangers have often promised something handsome to the man who first ascended the mountain, but from what I hear they have forgotten it; at present he is without recompense. He has exposed his life or at least his health, and perhaps he is already much altered. His companion has no need of reward, his father is one of the richest men in the valley; besides, it is not the same with an amateur as a guide.’5
It was very impressive. But nothing which Bourrit said agreed in the slightest with Paccard’s version of events. Having got wind of Bourrit’s machinations, Paccard produced a detailed certificate describing the climb. It was signed by Balmat and stated unequivocably that Paccard had proposed the route, had led the ascent, had encouraged Balmat when he was flagging and had helped him with his baggage, and that when he had reached the summit Balmat ‘was obliged to run to be nearly as soon as he was on the aforesaid spot’.6 Balmat stated outright that ‘Paccard called me and I followed.’7 His signature was witnessed by two of his fellow guides. Paccard was perhaps going a little far here, but he gave a more restrained account to Saussure who stated in his diary that as they neared the summit ‘they endured great fatigue from the fact that the surface was covered with a thin crust which alternately bore them and gave way under their steps. The guide told him he could not persevere unless he (Paccard) was prepared to take the lead from time to time and to break the snow and he did this all the way to the top.’8 A brace of German barons, who had been advised by Saussure to watch the climb from a nearby hill, had seen the two men waving from the summit. And every subsequent report from Saussure and others attributed the climb if not solely to Paccard then certainly to both men.
Tempers in Chamonix ran high. When Balmat accused Paccard of forging the certificate, the doctor knocked him to the ground. Eventually, Saussure had to intervene, forcing Bourrit to reword his letter in less antagonistic terms. Bourrit made a number of pale excuses: Paccard hadn’t actually reached the summit; his narrative was badly written; it contained information damaging to Saussure’s reputation; if he, Bourrit, did not believe what he had written then he would have published it anonymously; and so on. In the end Bourrit made a few reluctant amendments, but even the revised document was damaging. One of Paccard’s relatives was imprisoned for a day for using foul language about its author.
Paccard fought back as best he could. He sent two letters to the Journal de Lausanne correcting Bourrit’s assertions and issued a prospectus inviting people to subscribe to his own forthcoming narrative. His manuscript, which he foolishly gave to Bourrit’s editor Bérenger, was never published - or if it was, it was circulated privately; at any rate, no copy of it has ever been found - and in the absence of any solid opposition Bourrit’s version therefore became accepted as the true one. After all, was he not the Historian of the Alps? Balmat was accepted as the conqueror of Mont Blanc and Paccard as his accomplice. Balmat received Saussure’s reward -Paccard, unwisely, made no claim; he had no need of the money, as Bourrit had pointed out, but it would have strengthened his position - on top of which Balmat was given a gift of 50 Piedmontese pistoles by the King of Sardinia, who also granted him the title ‘Balmat dit Mont-Blanc’. A public subscription was opened for his benefit, managed rather inefficiently by Bourrit who was suspected for a while of siphoning some of the money into his own pocket, and on the proceeds Balmat built a handsome house for himself. Plaques and statues were erected in his honour, roads were named after him. He was worshipped in Chamonix and became the most sought-after guide in the valley.
So who did conquer Mont Blanc? For two centuries historians throughout Europe have pondered this question. In the wake of Bourrit’s letter the laurels were given to Balmat. Then, in the early twentieth century, when Saussure’s diaries and other material came to light, they were transferred to Paccard. The truth lies somewhere in between. Paccard was a well-educated man who had no need to lie, but was goaded by Bourrit’s account to say that he had led Balmat to the summit. Balmat, meanwhile, had every reason to lie but was unquestionably the fitter of the two and if anyone led it was probably him. The reports which attributed the triumph to Paccard should be taken with a pinch of salt. It was common in those times to ascribe victory of any sort to the man with the highest social standing -several people, including Britain’s Lord Palmerston, congratulated Saussure on the conquest even though he took no part in it - and one can imagine Balmat’s indignation at having to concede glory to a man simply because he was a doctor. The injustice was underlined by a twentieth-century commentator who said, in Paccard’s defence, that Balmat had been paid to do his job and should have been satisfied with the money. On the other hand Paccard was a serious and dedicated mountaineer. The description he gave Saussure of conditions during the climb was far more plausible than Balmat’s. And far from being unfit, he was up Mont Blanc within days of his return, seeking an easier route to the top.
From this distance it is impossible to judge the matter fairly. Essentially, the controversy revolved around Bourrit’s insecurity and Balmat’s desire to get his hands on Saussure’s money. That two men had climbed the highest mountain in Europe was almost incidental. If Saussure had put a bounty on any other peak - and there were plenty of them - it would have engendered similar squabbles. One can only agree with the Alpine historian Paul Payot, a recent Mayor of Chamonix, in his decision that ‘When climbers rope up they form a team that has to stick together for better or for worse. If Paccard and Balmat had followed modern methods and used a rope none of these arguments would have taken place. They did not use a rope. Nonetheless, they were still a team.’9 And so they should be given equal credit.
At the time, people of note attached little significance to the Balmat-Paccard ascent; few were even aware of the sound and fury that accompanied it. For all the Romantic swooning, and for all Bourrit and Saussure’s admiration of the views, the overriding purpose of climbing an Alp was to make scientific observations. What these observations would reveal was uncertain - Saussure believed that the Alps were once islands in a primordial sea and hoped, therefore, in a pre-Darwinian way, that they would shed light on humankind’s origins - but they had to be made and Paccard’s frost-fumbled work with his barometer had revealed nothing. (The instrument, needless to say, had been damaged during the ascent.) In the circles that mattered, Mont Blanc remained a virgin peak. It was up to Saussure to complete the task.