Page 107 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
They went looking for roses with a flashlight. It seems they were hardly able to distinguish them in the foliage. A joyous intoxication made them steal, run and joke among the monuments. “You can't imagine what it was like,” he said to me.
The women were given the job of weaving the wreaths and making the bouquets. It was their men who made the nicest ones.
In the morning everything was wilted. They threw the flowers into the garbage, and the concierge must have wondered what kind of orgy had taken place that night in rooms where no bouquet ever entered, except, occasionally, an orchid. Most of the pimps did not dare attend so poor a funeral. Their dignity, their insolence, required worldly solemnity. They sent their women. Guy went. When he came back, he told me how sad it had been.
“We looked ratty! It's too bad you didn't come. There were only whores and tramps.” “Oh! you know, I see them every day.”
“It's not that, Jean. It was so that someone would answer when the mutes asked for the family. I felt ashamed.”
(When I was in the Mettray Reformatory, I was ordered to attend the burial of a youngster who had died in the infirmary. We accompanied him to the little cemetery of the reformatory. The grave−diggers were children. After they lowered the coffin, I swear that, if anyone had asked, as they do in the city, for “the family", I would have stepped forward, tiny in my mourning.)
Guy stretched a bit; then he smiled.
“Why were you ashamed?”
“It was too crummy. A pauper's funeral.”
“We sure got tight. We drank all night long. I'm glad be back. At least I'11 be able to take off my shoes.”
When I was young, I wanted to rob churches. Later on, I experienced the joy of removing rugs, vases and sometimes paintings. In M..., G... didn't notice the beauty of the laces. When I told him that the surplices and altar−cloths were very valuable, his broad forehead wrinkled. He wanted a figure. In the sacristy I muttered, “I don't know.”
“How much, fifty?”
I didn't answer. I was in a hurry to get out of the room where the priests get dressed, undressed, button their cassocks and knot their albs.
“Well, how much? Fifty?”
His impatience got the better of me and I answered, “More, a hundred thousand.”
G...'s fingers trembled and got heavy. They were damaging the cloths and the angular laces. As for his face, which was in a bad light and was excited with greed, I don't know whether to call it hideous or splendid. We calmed down along the banks of the Loire. We sat down in the grass while waiting for the first freight−train.
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