Page 100 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
feet. A bantering smile, a pleasant tune whistled between my teeth, a bit of irony in the fingers curled around the cigarette would be enough to renew my contact with desolation in satanic solitude (unless I should be very fond of some murderer of whom that gesture, smile and pleasant tune are characteristic.) After stealing B.R.'s ring:
“What if he learns about it?” I asked myself. “I sold it to someone he knows!”
I imagine, for he likes me, his grief and my shame. So I envisage the worst: death. His.
On the Boulevard Haussmann I saw the place where certain burglars had been arrested. In order to flee from the store, one of them had tried to plunge through the glass. By accumulating damage around his arrest, he no doubt thought he was giving it an importance one would no longer grant to the fact preceding it: the burglary. He was already trying to surround his person with a bloody, astounding, intimidating pomp, in the midst of which he himself remained pitiful. The criminal magnifies his exploit. He wants to disappear amid great display, in an enormous setting brought on by destiny. Meanwhile he decomposes his deed into rigid moments, he dismembers it.
“What care I for men's contempt when my blood...”
Could I, unblushingly, still admire handsome criminals if I were not familiar with their natures? If they have been so unfortunate as to serve the beauty of many poems, I wish to help them. The utilisation of crime by an artist is impious. Someone risks his life, his glory, only to be used as ornament for a dilettante. Though the hero be imaginary, a living creature inspired him. I refuse to take delight in his sufferings if I have not yet shared them. I shall first incur the scorn of men, their judgment. I distrust the saintliness of Vincent de Paul. He should have agreed to commit the galley−slave's crime instead of merely taking his place in irons.
The tone of this book is likely to scandalize the best spirits and not the worst. I am not trying to be scandalous. I am assembling these notes for a few young men. I should like them to consider these remarks as instruction in a highly delicate ascesis. The experience is painful and I have not yet completed it. That its point of departure may be a romantic reverie matters little if I work at it rigorously, as at a mathematical problem, if I derive from it materials useful in the elaboration of a work of art, or for the achievement of a moral perfection (for the destruction, perhaps, of these very materials, for their dissolution) approaching that saintliness which for me is still merely the most beautiful word in human language.
Limited by the world which I oppose, cut out by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the cutting out more cruel.
Acts must be carried out to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is because an action has not been completed that it is vile.
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