Premier de cordée
This first printing is rare: it appeared while the author was serving as a war correspondent alongside the Allies on the Tunisian front. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he was held in Naples, where he spent a month in a condemned man’s cell, before being transferred by the Gestapo to the prison of Fresnes, then to Vichy. He obtained permission to return under surveillance to Chamonix, then occupied by the Italians. He escaped in 1943, when German troops arrived, and went underground in the Beaufortain region, serving as a liaison officer with the FFI and later on the staff of the 5th Chasseurs Alpins demi-brigade. The text itself had first been published in serial form as early as 1940, in La Dépêche algérienne.
It is “the most famous of all mountain novels. The first printing is rare: a later printing of 1941, 1942 or even 1943 is often passed off as the first edition! […] Copies of the first printing are rare, […] and highly sought after with an author’s inscription” (Perret, Guide des livres sur la montagne et l’alpinisme, Paris, Librairie Giraud-Badin, 2022, no. 1774). In the previous edition, Perret noted that he had only been able to find “a single copy, and that a sixth printing, with an author’s inscription dated August 1941.” This underscores the rarity of an inscribed copy such as ours, which bears no printing statement — and is certainly of the first printing, with an inscription strictly contemporary with publication.
In 1930, Frison-Roche became the first guide of the Compagnie des guides de Chamonix not to be a native of Chamonix — he came from the Beaufortain — and he was also the top graduate of the first class of certified instructors of the FFS, in 1934. Premier de cordée tells of the expedition undertaken by the guides to bring back to Chamonix the body of one of their own, Jean Servettaz. The “first on the rope” is the missing man’s own son, Pierre, who undertakes a perilous climb during which he suffers a terrible fall. A wonderful novel, adapted for the cinema as early as 1944 by René Daquin.
A good copy in wrappers of the very first printing, consistent with the bibliographical points cited by Perret.