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They talked of wild projects, then climbed together, their efforts culminating in the perilous but brilliant first ascent of the Col du Caïman.
    It would have been logical had Terray and Rébuffat formed the perfect partnership that Terray later formed with Lachenal. Yet temperamentally, the men were not a good match, and that disparity emerged on snow and rock. “The climbs we did together,” Terray reflected in 1961, “. . . were quite good for those days but notreally exceptional . . . [E]ven taking into account poor conditions and equipment our times were quite slow.”
    Rébuffat “was an extremely good rock climber,” Terray later wrote.
    By contrast, however, he was deficient in some of the qualities which distinguish the mountaineer from the climber, such as a sense of direction and ease of movement on mixed ground and snow and ice. I was completely his opposite. I was rather nervous and lacking in confidence and, apart from occasional flashes, a very mediocre rock climber. But I had an unusual sense of direction and was completely at my ease on all types of high mountain terrain.
    Quixotically, instead of forming the ideal cordée, or rope team, during the middle years of the war, Rébuffat and Terray bought a farm together in Les Houches, a hamlet just down the Arve valley from Chamonix. Their bizarre experiment in pastoralism was an attempt, as Terray put it, “to find a way of living in the mountains, so that I could continue climbing and skiing.” But Rébuffat had had, since childhood, a mortal fear of cows. In addition, both men were far too restless to settle down to the grinding discipline of farm life. The agricultural lark ended in 1944.
    A concomitant factor was that in the meantime, Terray had fallen in love with a teacher from Saint-Gervais-les-Bains. Marianne was “very blonde, with porcelain-blue eyes . . . young and pretty . . . [with] a taste for things elegant and intellectual.” The last sort of life she wanted was to become a farmer’s wife. In love herself, Marianne agreed to marry Lionel in 1942, but from their wedding on, the ménage at Les Houches was doomed.
    Terray scraped a living out of teaching winters in the ski school at Les Houches, and during the last year of the war he performed his daring jaunts of mountain warfare as a member of the Compagnie Stéphane. Just like Rébuffat, however, Terray had set as his highest ambition becoming a Chamonix guide. His birthplace of Grenoble was not as glaring a stigma as Rébuffat’s hailing from Marseille, but there was no question Terray was a “foreigner.” Yethis skill and tenacity won out. Shortly after the war, and shortly after he met Lachenal, Terray was accepted into the elite fraternity of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix.
    L ACHENAL GREW UP IN A NNECY , the winsome lakefront French village south of Geneva. If Terray’s parents had become grands bourgeois through industrial success, Lachenal’s remained petits bourgeois through and through. Sober, frugal, and conservative, they ran an old-fashioned grocery store on a busy Annecy street. From childhood on, Louis felt the pinch of near-poverty.
    Temperamentally, he was the opposite of his parents. Intensely curious, he was both an avid reader and a restless adventurer. The driven impatience that became the hallmark of his climbing stamped his spirit from his earliest years. At a tender age, he realized he was addicted to risk. The passion first took the form of a systematic campaign, with Louis’s best friend, to sneak without paying into every movie theater in Annecy. Each theater required a different technique. The thrill was the chance of getting caught. Once the boys had succeeded in sneaking in, Louis would laugh with uncontainable joy. Yet in truth, he hated movies. As soon as the first scenes came on the screen, he would tell his friend, “Come on,