Jacques Cousteau (14 page)

Five minutes into the dive, when Cousteau and Dumas had reached the elbow in the tunnel, Simone Cousteau had seen the bubbles stop gurgling to the surface. She could not stand to watch the still water, and fled to the village, where she ducked into a cafe and ordered a brandy. Soon after she sat down, a man running from the direction of the fountain was crying out that one of the divers had drowned. Simone grabbed the man as he passed. What color was the mask of the dead man? Red, the man replied. Cousteau’s mask was blue. Simone felt the weight of mortal dread lift but only for a moment. The man she loved second only to her husband was dead. Dazed, she staggered back up the path to the base of the cliff to face the horrible truth. There she received one of the most wonderful gifts of her life. Both Cousteau and Dumas stood warming themselves over a barrel of burning gasoline, gesturing wearily to Tailliez and the others.

Later that day, Tailliez and Guy Morandière, who had been with the group since the beginning, descended into the fountain wearing only long underwear and lightweight belts so they would remain positively buoyant. At 120 feet, both divers felt the unmistakable onset of nitrogen narcosis and aborted their descent. After Tailliez signaled with six tugs, Morandière watched in horror as his partner whipped out his dagger and started slashing at the rope. Morandière swam
under Tailliez, grabbed his ankles, and kicked for the dim green opening above them. On the surface, the crowd gasped when they saw Tailliez break water surrounded by a cloud of blood. In his rapture, imagining that he was entangled in the guide rope, Tailliez had slashed at it and in the process cut the fingers of his hand to the bone.

The disasters in the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse should not have happened, the divers concluded on the drive back to Toulon. They were underwater nowhere near long enough to have been stricken with nitrogen narcosis. They wondered if somehow the clear, still water in the cavern had created different pressures on their bodies than the sea. Dumas suggested that perhaps they weren’t narced at all, but rather had suffered from some unknown reaction to fear in the absolute darkness. Or maybe there was something wrong with the air they were breathing. The following day, they analyzed the remaining air in their cylinders, and discovered that it was contaminated with six times the amount of carbon monoxide in normal air. The carbon monoxide could have come from only one source: their new compressor. They fired it up, attached a tank for refilling, and saw that the air intake of the compressor was sucking in exhaust from the gasoline engine. Under the pressure of 5 atmospheres, the carbon monoxide would have killed all of them in twenty minutes.

A month after they failed to uncover the secret of the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse,
Les Mousquemers
realized their far greater ambition to establish themselves as underwater cinematographers. In 1939, the French minister for arts and education had proposed the creation of an international event to celebrate motion pictures, naming the Mediterranean seaside resort town of Cannes as its site. This First International Film Festival, which would have been presided over by Louis Lumière, had been postponed until the autumn of 1946. It opened on September 20 for a two-week run, becoming the first major cultural event in postwar Europe.

Producers from a dozen countries presented twenty-three films, including Billy Wilder’s
The Lost Weekend
from the United States;
Brief Encounter
, by David Lean, from Britain;
The Prize
, by Alf Sjoberg, from Sweden; and
Épaves
, by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Frédéric Dumas, and Philippe Tailliez. The festival was more a film forum than a competition, because every film entered won a medal.
Les Mousquemers
, their families, and friends savored the gasps of the audience in the darkened
theater watching men swim like fish as they explored shipwrecks that had never before been seen by human eyes. At the end of the festival, in the great hall of the Casino de Cannes,
Épaves
was awarded the special prize from the Center for the Arts, Literature, and the Cinema. Tailliez stood on the dais during the presentation looking like a slightly awkward sailor on shore leave, Dumas like a wild animal indoors for the first time. Cousteau, however, was beaming. He felt very much at home with the applause of the crowd and having all eyes focused on him but was far more thrilled by the possibility that he might really be able to make a living as an underwater cinematographer.

A WEEK AFTER Cousteau savored his triumph at Cannes, word reached him from Paris that his brother, Pierre-Antoine, had been arrested as a Nazi collaborator. During the war, Cousteau and PAC had chosen different sides, but they had never renounced each other. Their family bond meant more to them than national loyalty or the dismal business of doing whatever was necessary to survive and protect their wives and children. As a member of the resistance, Cousteau may not have agreed with PAC’s politics or his loyalties during the war, but he could not forget the beloved PAC who had made his early childhood bearable.

“He was my brother,” Cousteau said twenty years later. “Nothing else mattered.”

As the American army massed at Chartres for the assault on Paris on August 17, 1944, PAC and his wife had rushed to the rue des Pyramides to join a truck convoy the Germans had organized to evacuate their most highly cooperative French collaborators. Already, broadcasts from radio stations in England included reports of in absentia death sentences for the most notorious French turncoats. The scene on the rue des Pyramides was chaotic amid rumors that resistance partisans were also assembling nearby to execute them en masse when the Allied army took the city. More than twenty thousand collaborators fled Paris that night. The Cousteaus set off with a small band determined to find refuge in Italy. At the Austrian-Italian border they changed course, fleeing into the Alps and eventually surrendering to American troops as a much better alternative than the Free French, who would have shot them on sight.

In the Allied prison camp at Landeck, PAC posed as a Pole to hide from visiting French officers, who had come to claim their traitors. He persuaded the American commanding officer of the camp to release
Fernande to live free in a nearby village, and was even granted permission to visit her after he swore on his honor to return and never try to escape. A few weeks later, Jacques-Yves arrived unannounced with false passports and transit visas that would get his brother and his family first to Spain and then to South America. PAC refused to leave, telling Jacques that he had promised not to attempt an escape. The brothers argued. Jacques told Pierre-Antoine that his honor was already compromised as a collaborator, but family loyalty meant more than honor, acts of desperation during wartime, or political enchantment. PAC refused. Cousteau was incredulous. How could his brother not think of his own family before all else? PAC and his promise to a prison guard would be worthless to Fernande and his children when he stood against a wall smoking his last cigarette.

The French army eventually identified Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, seized him from the Americans, and transferred him to a military prison outside Paris. PAC knew that his chances were not good. Robert Brasillach had been executed despite a public outcry against killing so revered an author, regardless of his wartime crimes. There would be no dramatic outpouring of support for a relatively obscure newspaper editor. The volleys of firing squads echoed dozens of times a day in France’s prison towns, sending men far more luminous than he into eternity. PAC’s trial for treason was brief, little more than a recitation of undeniable facts about his very public life during the German occupation.

Jacques Cousteau testified in his navy uniform wearing the crimson ribbon of the Légion d’honneur awarded to him for his undercover work with the resistance. Cousteau knew he was there to plead not for acquittal but against the death sentence. PAC’s guilt as a collaborator was undeniable.

On November 23, 1946, the tribunal ignored Cousteau’s plea and sentenced Pierre-Antoine Cousteau to death by firing squad, setting April 6, 1947, as the date for his execution. A month later, as part of a general amnesty declared to heal the tormented nation, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at hard labor.

During the first months after the war, the tribulations of Jacques Cousteau’s family in Torquay, Paris, and the military penitentiary at Clairvaux produced a steady hum of anxiety. He refused to let it distract
him, however, from the revolution he was leading with the Aqua-Lung. Simone and their sons Jean-Michel and Philippe were safe with him in Sanary-sur-Mer. His parents, Daniel and Elizabeth, had taken PAC’s wife and children to England so they would not suffer the pains of being the family of a convicted traitor. There was simply nothing Cousteau could do about his brother. As always, his primitive sense for knowing what he could change and what he could not allowed him to live vigorously in the present.

(Left to right)
Jacques-Yves, Daniel, and Pierre-Antoine Cousteau during World War II
(
PRIVATE COLLECTION
)

Meanwhile, Émile Gagnan shipped a steady stream of Aqua-Lungs to Cousteau at the Undersea Research Group base in Toulon for training submariners, munitions experts, spies, and reconnaissance teams to scuba dive. Gagnan had replaced the original rectangular Bakelite case of the regulator with a round metal housing with two cast-metal horns to which were attached specially made flexible rubber hoses leading to a single mouthpiece. Each regulator bore a plate with the engraved inscription
Scaphandre Autonome Cousteau Gagnan
. There had been no
publicity about the Aqua-Lung, except for a slight flurry of interest after
Épaves
won the prize at Cannes. Cousteau and Gagnan knew, however, that reports of dives to greater and greater depths and sensational discoveries beneath the sea would eventually find their way into newspapers, magazines, and newsreels.

The first internationally covered story on the Aqua-Lung was one that Cousteau, Gagnan, and the Undersea Research Group would much rather have done without. On September 17, 1947, Maurice Fargues—who had tended the ropes for Cousteau and Dumas in the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse—attempted a new depth record. He descended rapidly, tugging on a safety line attached to his weight belt as he went down to let the men on the surface know he was alive, a method of communication that was standard for hard-hat divers. Fargues reached 385 feet in three minutes, scratched his initials on a slate he tied to the anchor rope to verify the record, and signaled that he was okay. Long seconds passed with no tugs on the line. Tailliez barked the order to haul him up. At 150 feet, another diver on the way down the anchor rope saw Fargues hanging limply from the safety line, his mouthpiece dangling free. On the surface, they worked for hours to revive him but to no avail. Fargues had been breathing ordinary compressed air. Almost certainly, Cousteau and the others concluded, he was the first scuba diver to be killed by rapture of the deep. His death, and the new depth record confirmed by his scribbled initials on the slate at 385 feet, made headlines across Europe.

The death of Maurice Fargues hit everyone in the group hard. Cousteau was especially distraught. His Aqua-Lung had killed its first diver. “Maurice had shared our unfolding wonderment of the ocean since the earliest days of the Undersea Research Group,” Cousteau wrote in his memoir
The Silent World
. “We retain the memory of his prodigal comradeship. We will not be consoled that we were unable to save him.”

Since the time Cousteau had suffered convulsions while testing the first oxygen rebreather seven years earlier, he had known that breathing compressed gas underwater would be dangerous in some unexpected ways. Every incident was above all else a problem to be solved. Fargues’s handwriting on the slate at 300 feet was completely legible; at 385 it was a scribble. Apparently, 300 feet was the maximum depth a scuba diver could reach while breathing ordinary compressed air.
Cousteau and the other divers immediately began experimenting with mixing air and helium to replace the nitrogen and reduce the possibility of narcosis.

As a tonic to banish the grief and the implications of a diver dying while using an Aqua-Lung, the Undersea Research Group embarked on its first archaeology expedition, to a sunken Roman ship off the coast of Tunisia. Tailliez, who was still in charge of the group, gave Cousteau command of the former German dive tender
Albatross
. The 78-foot vessel had been seized by the Russians, then given to the British, and finally handed over to the French navy as the spoils of war were shuffled around Europe among the victors. The group renamed it
L’Ingénieur Elie Monnier
to honor a navy engineer and hard-hat diver who had died when a bomb detonated under him while he was inspecting the wreck of the battleship
Bretagne
. With it, they would be able to travel across the Mediterranean, live relatively comfortably, make dozens of dives to the wreck, and use the ship’s cranes to haul up what they found.