QUESTIONED one evening late last year by a television show host what he would want to be were he given the choice of a second life, Tancrède Melet replied without hesitation: “I’ll absolutely love to be an eagle, a free and lonesome being who rises up to extreme heights and feels one with the sky, the clouds and the stunningly shining mountain peaks and valleys far below.”

Melet’s fascination with the heights was obviously inborn. As a schoolboy in a small town in the southern French Herault region, he remained shy and much self-conscious because of a slight stammer. But when he visited Mont Blanc at age eleven, he immediately understood what his real passion in life was, and from then on his newly gained self-confidence remained unhampered.

It all began with skiing and mountain climbing lessons in which he excelled with no great effort. But he used his accidentally discovered talent to metamorphose himself into more than just a sportsman. Plunging his body into the void became for him not only an art but also a poetic sensation as well as a spiritual experience.

Melet once told a daily newspaper reporter: “Since early boyhood an everlasting memory for me has remained watching a short film in which the legendary German stuntman Karl Wallenda is seen falling to his death from a wire strung between the two towers of a ten-storey building in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1978. What made that man look for all those thrills again and again throughout his life till that fatal crash at age seventy-three? It may be a mystery to the others, but I think I fully understand Karl Wallenda.”

Nevertheless, at the insistence of his parents Melet had to continue his studies. Though after earning his degree he found employment in a software firm, four years of home-to-office then back-home routine proved to be a torture for the buoyant eagle who wanted to fly free into high skies. In 2008 he resigned, bought a four-wheel-drive station wagon and went up and down the Alps looking for like-minded young fellows to form a band of mountain acrobats performing adrenaline charged dare devilries along the Mont Blanc flanks.

The twenty-strong team, when it finally came into being, started paragliding, tightrope walking, parachute jumping and other audacious performances at the heights of four thousand metres, or even above.

Then Melet came up with a new, daring idea. If two acrobats could take off at the same time holding on to ropes attached to two separate hot-air balloons, they could jump into each other’s places at a certain height and at a well-coordinated moment, to the utter amazement and delight of the spectators.

Dauntless and risky though they always appeared, Melet’s inventions never lacked mathematical calculations and were performed with a venturesome and idyllic touch. While rehearsing his new exploit on Tuesday, Jan 5, he held on to the cord of his blown-up hot-air balloon as he gave instructions to his team.

Then, all of a sudden, the balloon broke loose from safety attachments for a hitherto unexplained reason, and zoomed high up into the sky taking Melet with it. As his partners looked up helplessly, he finally fell onto the rough, stony cliff and died instantly. He was thirty-two.

Guy Chaumereuil, the head of the Mountain Climbers’ Association in the Alps, later told a local newspaper reporter: “Tancrède always said to me, life is not worth living if one refuses to take risks. I found this strange coming from a young man. But he was precise and very concentrated when he worked on a new idea, though he also appeared shy and listened very carefully when the others talked while he stayed quiet most of the time.”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, February 7th, 2016

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