Page 20 - The Thief's Journal

marshes, to the algae, that I should like to descend — I withdraw further from men.
The Thief's Journal
homage as I pass, bow without bowing, but recognize me. They know that I am their living, moving, agile representative, conqueror of the wind. They are my natural emblem, but through them I have roots in that French soil which is fed by the powdered bones of the children and youths stabbed, massacred and burned by Gilles de Rais.
2
Through that thorny plant of Cevennes , I take part in the criminal adventures of Vacher. Thus, through her
whose name I bear, the vegetable kingdom is my familiar. I can consider all flowers without pity; they are members of my family. If, through them, I rejoin the nether realms — though it is to the bracken and their
3
1. The French national agency in charge of the care of foundlings (Translator's note).
2. The very day he met me, Jean Cocteau called me “his Spanish genet” (genet d'Espagne — rush−leaved
broom). He did not know what this country had done to me.
3. Botanists know a variety of genet which they call winged−broom (genet aile).
The atmosphere of the planet Uranus is said to be so heavy that the ferns there are creepers; the animals drag along, crushed by the weight of the gases. I want to mingle with these humiliated creatures which are always on their bellies. If metempsychosis should grant me a new dwelling−place, I choose that forlorn planet. I inhabit it with the convicts of my race. Amidst hideous reptiles, I pursue an eternal, miserable death in a darkness where the leaves will be black, the waters of the marshes thick and cold. Sleep will be denied me. On the contrary, more lucid than ever, I recognize the unclean fraternity of the smiling alligators.
It was not at any precise period of my life that I decided to be a thief. My laziness and day−dreaming having led me to the Mettray Reformatory, where I was supposed to remain until “the age of twenty−one", I escaped and enlisted for five years so as to collect a bonus for voluntary enlistment. After a few days I deserted, taking with me some valises belonging to negro officers.
For a time I lived by theft, but prostitution was better suited to my indolence. I was twenty years old. I had therefore known the army when I came to Spain. The dignity conferred by the uniform, the isolation from the world which it imposes, and the soldier's trade itself afforded me a certain peace— though the Army is on society's side — and self−confidence. My situation as a naturally humiliated child was, for some months, tempered. I knew at last the sweetness of being welcomed by men. My life of poverty in Spain was a kind of degradation, a fall involving shame. I was fallen. Not that during my stay in the army I would have been a pure soldier, governed by the rigorous virtues which create castes (my homosexuality would have been enough for me to incur disapproval) but there was still going on within my soul a secret labor which one day came to light. It is perhaps their moral solitude — to which I aspire — which makes me admire traitors and love them — this taste for solitude being the sign of my pride, and pride the manifestation of my strength, the employment and proof of this strength. For I shall have broken the stoutest of bonds, the bonds of love. And I am so in need of love from which to draw vigor enough to destroy it! It was in the army that I witnessed for the first time (at least I think it was) the despair of one of my robbed victims. To rob soldiers was to betray, for I was breaking the bonds of love uniting me with the soldier who had been robbed.
Plaustener was good−looking, strong and confident. He got up on his bed in order to look in his pack. He tried to find the hundred−franc note which I had taken a quarter of an hour earlier. His gestures were those of a clown. He was on the wrong track. He imagined the most unlikely hiding−places: the mess−kit from which he had nevertheless just eaten, the brush−bag, the grease can. He was ridiculous. He said, “I'm not crazy. Couldn't I have put it there?”
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