Victor de Beauclair’s last climb

Book review: Emil Zopfi’s new documentary novel recreates a tragic story from the Belle Époque of climbing and ballooning

But were they really a pair? Visitors who step into Zermatt’s churchyard see them at once – the twin headstones leaning tenderly towards each other, one for Irmgard Schiess (b.1903) and the other for Victor de Beauclair (b. 1874). Both died on 15 August 1929, “am Matterhorn”. Noting the age gap of almost three decades between this ill-fated rope team, most visitors just sigh, shake their heads and move on – leaving the question unanswered.

The gravestones of Irmgard Schiess and Victor de Beauclair

But not Emil Zopfi, a prominent Swiss writer on mountains and mountaineering. Taking as his challenge the almost complete lack of accessible public information about the couple – just try Googling them – he has recreated their lives and times in a documentary novel, Victors letzte Fahrt (Victor’s last climb). Along the way, he sheds plentiful light on the origins of ski-mountaineering, high-altitude balloon flying, and alpine climbing without guides.

Victor de Beauclair in 1898

Despite the French-sounding surname, Victor de Beauclair was born in Cantagalo, Brazil, where his father, an expatriate German doctor, had a practice. The family returned to Germany in 1878, settling in Freiburg im Breisgau, not far from the Swiss border. Zopfi suggests that this early deracination left de Beauclair somehow adrift – he never gave up his Brazilian passport, never married and never stayed long at any address.

In 1892, de Beauclair started his first year at Zurich University. His medical studies did not prosper, then or later. A glance at his alpinistic record suggests why. By 1896, de Beauclair had started to build up an impressive list of both summer and winter ascents. This was the year when he made the first ever ski ascent of a Swiss three-thousander, the Oberalpstock, with Wilhelm Paulcke, Peter Steinweg and Erwin Baur.

On the Oberalpstock in 1896:
From left to right: de Beauclair, Steinweg, Baur, Paulcke

Another notable first was the first ski traverse of the Bernese Oberland’s central glaciers, undertaken over four days in January 1897 with Paulcke and three more companions. Again, Paulcke was the moving spirit, having pioneered ski-mountaineering in the mountains around Freiburg. The geologist even designed his own improved ski binding for the Oberland tour – one of the book’s revelations is that modern alpine ski-touring was effectively invented in the Black Forest.

The Bernese Oberland traverse team:
From left to right: Paulcke, de Beauclair, Mönnichs, Ehlert, Lohmüller

As a member of this Freiburg-based group, de Beauclair soon became an acknowledged expert and evangelist (“Wanderprediger”) for ski-mountaineering. In 1899, he was elected into the Academic Alpine Club of Zurich, a club set up a few years before specifically for student alpinists who preferred to climb without professional guides. 

Two years later, de Beauclair helped to found the Skiclub Zürichs, serving as its first president – later he co-founded the Schweizer Skiverband, a national federation, too. And in 1902, in a neat twist on the guideless theme, he ran the first ski course for the Bergführer of Zermatt.

Pioneering a new mountain sport came with the inevitable nemesis. In January 1899, during a ski-tour on the Susten Pass, an avalanche overwhelmed Gustav Mönnichs and Reinhold Ehlert, two of de Beauclair’s companions on the Oberland traverse. De Beauclair spent several days that winter searching for them, but the bodies appeared only when the snow melted in June.

Yet it may have been a summer accident that more decisively changed the trajectory of de Beauclair’s career. In 1907, an afternoon storm trapped three prominent AACZ members near the Matterhorn’s summit, one of them dying during the forced overnight bivouac. Zopfi suggests that the accident helped to hasten de Beauclair’s drift away from the club’s orbit. 

In any case, he’d already made his final breach with Zurich University – without qualifying as a doctor – and he’d taken up a new form of high-altitude pioneering. In fact, de Beauclair’s first flight with his new gas-filled balloon “Cognac” had taken place as early as August 1906. A companion on two of these early flights was Heinrich Spoerry, the AACZ member who would perish on the Matterhorn the following summer.

"Cognac" at the "Eigergletscher" station, 1908

In 1908, “Cognac” lifted off from the meadows beside the Eiger rack-railway’s Eigergletscher station and landed the following day at Gignese in Italy. Depending on how one defines the term, this was the first transalpine flight by any kind of aircraft. Alas, the following year, the balloon was lost at sea after another transalpine flight, when de Beauclair had to ditch it in the Gulf of Genoa. This reverse didn’t stop him from co-founding a Zurich-based club that is still flying gas balloons more than a century later.

He kept climbing too. In 1911, he made a first ascent on the west face of the Mönch, one of the Bernese Oberland’s four-thousanders, in the company of the guide Fritz Steuri, who would later win fame with Maki “Yūkō” Aritsune on the Eiger’s Mittellegi Ridge. There was also a professional reason to focus on this region, since he was now working as the secretary of the Jungfraubahn rack-railway company. Then, all too suddenly, the Belle Époque was over.

Since records for the 1914-17 period are thin, it’s hard to say whether Victor de Beauclair had a good war. As a Brazilian national, he was exempt from the fighting. But many of his former climbing companions found themselves in uniform, whether in neutral Switzerland or in the armies of the warring powers. Several failed to return from the conflict, and those who did had experienced things that would forever put a distance between them and their former climbing partner.

When the smoke cleared, the world had changed. Balloons were “cold coffee”; now it was heavier-than-air craft, piloted by younger men, who made the dramatic flights over the Alps. But de Beauclair was still an acknowledged alpinist, and it was as a rope partner and ski tour leader that he got to know Irmgard Schiess and her twin sister, Herta (known to family and friends as Spatzi and Hatzi) together with their father, Erhard, also a keen mountaineer.

And so we come to 15 August 1929, when de Beauclair reached the summit of the Matterhorn with Herta, Irmgard and the guide Andreas Kohler. Descending in two rope pairs, the party was already within sight of safe ground when de Beauclair pulled on a loose rock and fell down the east face with his rope partner, Irmgard. “Once again the Sphinx of Zermatt has demanded her toll …” began the eulogy written by a friend and quoted in full by Zopfi.

It would have been a considerable feat just to ferret out the facts of de Beauclair’s life, of which the above is the barest summary. But Zopfi has done much more – he has fashioned these facts into a convincing narrative arc.

Writing in the dramatic present, and ranging boldly back and forth through time, he assembles a series of tableaux that gradually build up a portrait of the protagonist and other dramatis personae. Everything moves inexorably and logically towards that fatal rendezvous in Zermatt.

As in a well-crafted film, the focus changes constantly. Some scenes are recreated in exquisite detail, elsewhere an entire world war passes by in a couple of pages. In part, this zoom technique reflects the variety and variability of Zopfi’s sources – books, archives, genealogies, and conversations with descendant families – for the source materials are part of his narrative too.

In this, he is ahead of the game. At the very university once attended by Victor de Beauclair, a current professor of modern history calls for “a greater acknowledgement of authorial metadata in the writing of history” – in other words, historians should be more open about how they go about selecting and using their archives.*

This is exactly how Zopfi works. The author is present in his work, starting with an account of his own fateful encounter with the “Sphinx of Zermatt” in the summer of 1964. And so are his sources: take the scenes in the book’s early pages in which he recreates the Whitsun weekend of 1929 when de Beauclair led a ski-touring group that also included the Schiess twins. “And you, my young friend, will write up this trip,” says the fictional de Beauclair, clapping a young writer named Alfred Graber on the shoulder. Of course he will. For it is Graber’s memoir that Zopfi will tap for this scene, almost a century in the future.

Victors letzte Fahrt is the work of a master craftsman. Or Zopfi might perhaps prefer the analogy of a gifted route-finder, given that he spent many years at the extreme end of the Swiss climbing scene. The narrative technique is polished, and the action, as in all the best novels, driven by psychological insight. The book should be read by anybody interested in “how it was” within alpinistic circles during that faraway era.

After all that, may we still ask if Victor de Beauclair and Irmgard Schiess were really a pair? Suffice it to say that Zopfi addresses the question with the subtlety that the sources demand and allow. And circling back to those twin gravestones in Zermatt, he concludes the book with a thunderclap revelation. As to its nature, your reviewer isn’t saying. You’ll have to read the book for yourself ….

References

Victors letzte Fahrt (Victor’s last climb) is a biographical novel by Emil Zopfi, published in 2023 by AS Verlag, Zurich (269 pages, German language). It includes an appendix with a comprehensive chronology of Victor de Beauclair’s life, lists of persons, families involved, and a comprehensive bibliography.

*See epilogue in Martin Dusinberre, Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

“The attack was quite too dreadful for words”

Recent run-ins with a Norwegian eagle lend credence to an old report from the Maritime Alps

A young golden eagle has been killed after reportedly attacking and wounding at least four people, including a bike courier, in a large area of central and southern Norway, reports the Guardian. 

Copperplate by Gustave Roue in La Suisse illustrée (1872)

This strange episode recalls a tale told by the redoubtable alpinist and mountain photographer Mrs Aubrey Le Blond in her book Adventures on the Roof of the World (1907), a catalogue of mountain accidents and derring-do. The following excerpt comes from a chapter headed "Some terrible experiences":

To be bombarded by falling stones in the Alps is bad enough. To be hurled from one’s foothold by a flock of eagles seems to me even more appalling. Though on one occasion, when on the slopes of a bleak and rocky peak in Lapland, in company with my husband, a pair of eagles came screaming so close to us that we drove them away by brandishing our ice-axes and throwing stones at them, I did not till recently believe that there could be positive danger to a climbing party from an onslaught by these birds.

It was only a few weeks ago that taking up one of Messrs Newnes’ publications I came upon an account of a tragedy in the Maritime Alps caused by an attack from eagles. On applying to the editor of the magazine in question, he kindly allowed me to make some extracts from a striking article by Mons. Antoine Neyssel. This gentleman with a friend, Mons. Joseph Monand, was making a series of ascents in the Maritime Alps with Sospello as their headquarters. From here they took a couple of guides and got all ready for a climb on the following morning, 23rd July. During the evening the amazing news reached them that a postman, while crossing a high pass, had been attacked and nearly killed by eagles. They at once went into the cottage where the poor man lay unconscious on two chairs, a pool of blood beneath him and his clothes torn to ribbons. A few days later he died from the terrible injuries he had received.

Though much shocked at the sad event, the climbers believed that their party of four would be quite safe, for each man had an ice-axe and some carried rifles. So the next morning they set out, and, ascending higher and higher, reached the glacier and put on the rope. They had forgotten all about the ferocious birds when suddenly, as they traversed the upper edge of a crevasse near the summit of their peak, the leading guide stopped with an exclamation of horror. Close to them the ground was strewn with feathers and marked with blood, doubtless the spot where the postman was attacked.

They passed on, however, and remembering that they were a party of four, felt reassured. But soon after weird cries came to their ears from below, followed by the whirr and beating of great wings. Looking cautiously over the abyss, they saw a fight of eagles in progress; feathers flew in the air and strange sounds came out of the seething mass. It seemed to rise towards them, and in their insecure position on the edge of a crevasse, they were badly placed to resist an attack. The foot-hold was of frozen and slippery snow.

Suddenly the eagles burst up and around them. The guides immediately cut the rope and each person did what he could to save himself. “Wherever possible,” says Mons, Neyssel, “we simply raced over the frozen snow like maniacs. In another moment they dashed upon us like an avalanche. I heard a shot —I suppose Monand fired, but I did not: I do not know why.

“The attack was quite too dreadful for words. Speaking for myself, I remember that the eagles struck me with stunning force with their wings, their hooked beaks, and strong talons. Every part of my body seemed to be assailed simultaneously. It was a fierce struggle for life or death. Strangely enough, I remember nothing of what happened to my companions. I neither saw nor heard anything of them after the first great rush of the eagles. It is a miracle I was not hurled to death into the crevasse.

“Do not ask me how long this weird battle lasted. It may have been five or six minutes, or a quarter of an hour. I do not know. I grew feebler, and felt almost inclined to give up the struggle, when the blood began to trickle down my face and nearly blinded me. I knew that every moment might be my last, and that I might be hurled into the crevasse. Strangely enough, the prospect did not appal me. From this time onward I defended myself almost mechanically, inclined every moment to give up and lie down.

“I gave no thought to the guides and my poor friend Monand. If I am judged harshly for this, I regret it; but I could not help it. All at once I heard loud, excited voices, but thought that these were merely fantastic creations of my own brain. In a moment or two, however, I could distinguish a number of men laying about them fiercely with sticks, and beating off the eagles.”

The villagers, having watched the ascent through a telescope had come to the rescue and had saved the lives of the writer and his two guides. His poor friend, however, was dashed into the crevasse, at the bottom of which his body was found five days later.

References

Jon Henley, "Golden eagle killed in Norway after attack on toddler in farmyard", The Guardian, 9 September 2024.

Mrs Aubrey Le Blond (Mrs Main), Adventures on the Roof of the World, London: T Fisher Unwin, 1907.

Header illustration is from Alexandre Scheurer, "Aasfresser mit schlechtem Ruf: Der Bartgeier zwischen Mythos und Realität", Die Alpen, November 2019. The article mentions an alleged attack by a vulture: "The best known and by far the most frequently cited case is probably that of June 2, 1870 in the Bernese Oberland (M. A. Feierabend, Die Schweizerische Alpenwelt, 1873). At that time, a 14-year-old boy was violently attacked with wing flaps, claws and beak and was seriously injured in the skull, back and chest. After his recovery, he went to the Bern Museum, where he identified his attacker among the local birds of prey: an adult bearded vulture."