By Lee Glandorf
The servant girl who would become known as Marie de Mont Blanc was born in 1778, in an alpine valley at the foot of the mountain’s sky-pointing spires. Her village near Chamonix sat nestled in an inhospitable corner of the Duchy of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia, ringed by glaciers and rivers of ice that locals likened to the tongues of dragons.
As a young girl born into rural poverty, Marie’s world was small – and cold. Peasants eked out a living raising cows on high mountain pastures and growing hardy cereals in rocky soil. If life in a remote alpine village wasn’t hard enough, a period of climate instability, known as the Little Ice Age, pushed her community to the brink. Advancing glaciers gobbled up farm land. Long, harsh winters swallowed harvests.
For generations, Chamoniards were raised to fear the glaciers and the grey Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice) that was said to be home to witches and demons. But in 1741, a party of English explorers braved the ice to “discover” the glaciers. On return to London, they bombarded literary journals with tales of their adventures, sparking a surge of explorers to descend on the once-hidden valley. Talk of summiting Mont Blanc began in 1760, when Swiss geologist Horace Bénédict de Saussure offered a reward to the first man to stand atop the “domed mountain.” After several tries, two locals, Dr. Michel Paccard and his guide Jacques Balmat, made the first recorded ascent of the 15,771-ft mountain in 1786. Marie was eight years old.
Two years later, an icy frost coated the fields in November and lasted until April, trapping the valley under snow. In Paris, “Siberian” cold and subsequent famine helped spark the riots that led the sans culottes to storm the Bastille that July. Perhaps the French Revolution seemed a world away to a hungry 11-year old Marie, but in three-years time the upheaval arrived in her village, when revolutionary soldiers marched into Chamonix to occupy and annex the Duchy of Savoy.
It’s something of a miracle, then, that Marie Paradis even survived to the age of thirty, let alone became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc. Marie, like most women of her class, was illiterate. She was a servant and single. Some accounts report she bore a son out of wedlock. Others say she lived with her widowed mother (or her daughter-in-law) in a shabby two-room cottage.
Artistic Renderings: Caroline Weaver
Were it not for Mont Blanc, she - like millions of other unmarried, untutored women - would barely register as a footnote in history. As it is, her story makes its way to us in garbled snatches and specious recountings by competing alpinists and embellishing novelists, including Alexandre Dumas and Mark Twain.
Some accounts say Marie was invited to climb Mount Blanc by a group of guides, including her friend Jacques Balmat, the pioneering mountaineer who summited in 1786. Though tourism had exploded in the decades since his feat, successful ascents of Mount Blanc were rare. Balmat was keen to demystify the climb (and drum up some more business). What better way to encourage others than to guide a woman to the top?
Marie’s own words support this tale, "I was only a poor servant,” she said in an account translated by alpinist Aubrey Le Blond nearly a century later. “One day, the guides said to me, 'We are going up there, come with us. Travellers will come and see you afterwards and give you presents.'”
In subsequent years, this desire for fame and “presents” was held against Marie by those looking to downplay her accomplishment. In some tellings, Marie is said to have approached the guides, which has been held up as evidence of her ignoble greed. Whether Marie was enticed to join the expedition or she was eager to try her luck, who can blame her? If anything, it speaks to the appalling lack of options for single women in the 19th century, if the best option for making a living meant risking life and limb to climb Europe’s highest peak.
The ascent took several days, a challenging journey for anyone, let alone a woman in wool skirts, a coat, shawl, and old leather shoes. Despite strength and endurance honed over years in service, Marie struggled (as did many of the men). “When I reached the Grand Plateau, I could not walk any longer. I felt very ill, and I lay down on the snow. I panted like a chicken in the heat.” She slipped and fell. Altitude sickness left her dizzy and fatigued. At one point, she told the guides to “Chuck me into a crevasse and go on yourselves.”
As for reaching the summit, again, accounts differ. Some say the guides carried her to the top, which she reached on July 14, 1808. Marie’s later words support this version, “‘They seized hold of me, they dragged me, they pushed me, they carried me, and at last we arrived. Once at the summit, I could see nothing clearly, I could not breathe, I could not speak.”
In Dumas’s story, a guide named Jacques Payot paints a different picture of the “stout-hearted wench.” In this telling, Marie bravely brings up the rear of the expedition, scaling a 1400 ft vertical ice wall with picks, light-heartedly asking for small reprieves in the pace, and reaching the top with minimal aid. In 1826, mountaineers Dr. Edmund John Clark and Captain Markham Sherwill published another version: “On arriving at the Petit Mulet, she was excessively exhausted, and almost fainting with fatigue; yet her resolution was not shaken, and, with a little assistance from her companions, she mounted safely to the summit of Mont Blanc, and redescended unhurt to the valley.”
Finally, in 1880, Mark Twain published a short and extremely flawed depiction of Marie’s climb in his book, A Tramp Abroad: “The first woman who ascended Mont Blanc was a girl aged twenty-two—Mlle. Maria Paradis—1809. Nobody was with her but her sweetheart, and he was not a guide.”
Whichever version you believe, it’s clear that Marie’s humble background biased the record. In 1838, an aristocrat named Henriette d'Angeville mounted an expensive exhibition up Mont Blanc, convinced she would be the first woman ever to do so. Upon arriving back in Chamonix, Marie boisterously led the celebrations for Henriette. Despite the warm welcome, it must have been a blow to belatedly learn of the older woman’s original summit. Lest it shadow her own achievements, Henriette painted Marie’s climb as a fluke. "Mont Blanc, when I went, had not yet been visited by any woman capable of telling the tale,” she wrote in her memoir.
Marie died a year later at the age of 61. Outside of scattered interviews, she rarely spoke of her ascent. Nor did she ever attempt the journey again. Once was enough.
Today, you can find Marie enshrined in Chamonix, poking her head out of a window atop the "Fresque des Guides" (Mural of Mountain Guides) on Rue du Docteur Paccard. It’s not far from the finish line of the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, which each year welcomes thousands of women to the Alps, running the trail Marie blazed in her long woolen skirts.
About the author: Lee Glandorf is a Boston-based writer who authors The Sweat Lookbook and is a self-described "runner and brand builder with a lot to say about women’s sports and fashion." She is a Yale rowing alum who majored in History. For this story, she sifted through many varied accounts to assemble what we think is now the definitive recounting of Marie's ascent of Mont Blanc.
About the artist: Caroline Weaver is a former Harvard swimmer who qualified for Olympic time trials and now creates stunning illustrations in her studio, Caroline Weaver Creative. We had only one rendering of Marie because her ascent in 1808 preceded photography. Caroline used that engraving as inspiration for this portrait. In her landscape scene, the artist imagines Marie with her 7 male climbing partners.
We were so fortunate to work with these talented women who have helped bring Marie Paradis' story out of obscurity and into the light!
