Page 5 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
criminals, offers me to them or invites me to crime. As I write this book, the last convicts are returning to France. The newspapers have been reporting the matter. The heir of lungs feels a similar emptiness if the republic deprives him of his anointment. The end of the penal colony prevents us from entering with our living minds into the mythical underground regions. Our most dramatic movement has been clipped away: our exodus, the embarkation, the procession on the sea, which was performed with bowed head. The return, this same procession in reverse, is without meaning. Within me, the destruction of the colony corresponds to a kind of punishment of punishment: I am castrated, I am shorn of my infamy. Unconcerned about beheading our dreams of their glories, they awaken us prematurely. The home prisons have their power: it is not the same. It is minor. It has none of that elegant and slightly bowed grace. The atmosphere is so heavy that you have to drag yourself about. You creep along. The home prisons are more stiffly erect, more darkly and severely; the slow and solemn agony of the penal colony was a more perfect blossoming of abjection. So that now the home jails, bloated with evil males, are black with them, as with blood which has been shot through with carbonic gas. (I have written “black”. The outfit of the convicts —captives, captivity, even prisoners, words too noble to name us — forces it upon me: it is made of brown homespun). It is toward them that my desire will turn. I am aware that there is often a semblance of the burlesque in the colony or in prison. On the bulky and resonant base of their wooden shoes, the frame of the condemned men is always somewhat shaky. In front of a wheel−barrow, it suddenly breaks up rather stupidly. In the presence of a guard they lower their heads and hold in their hands the big straw sun−bonnet — which the younger ones decorate (I should prefer it so) with a stolen rose granted by the guard — or a brown homespun beret. They strike poses of wretched humility. If they are beaten, something within them must nevertheless stiffen: the coward, the crook, cowardice, crookedness are— when kept in a state of the hardest, purest cowardice and crookedness — hardened by a “dousing", as soft iron is hardened by dousing. They persist in servility, despite everything. Though I do not neglect the deformed and misshapen, it is the handsomest criminals whom my tenderness adorns.
I. My excitement is the oscillation from one to the other.
Crime, I said to myself, had a long wait before producing such perfect successes as Pilorge and Angel Sun. In order to finish them off (the term is a cruel one!) it was necessary that a host of coincidences concur: to the handsomeness of their faces, to the strength and elegance of their bodies there had to be added their taste for crime, the circumstances which make the criminal, the moral vigor capable of accepting such a destiny, and, finally, punishment, its cruelty, the intrinsic quality which enables a criminal to glory in it, and, over all of this, areas of darkness. If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him! The same hesitation, the same crystallization of good fortune governs the success of a pure sleuth. I cherish them both. But if I love their crime, it is for the punishment it involves, “the penalty” (for I can not suppose that they have not anticipated it). One of them, the former boxer Ledoux, answered smilingly: “My crimes? It's before committing them that I might have regretted them") in which I want to accompany them so that, come what may, my love may be filled to overflowing.
I do not want to conceal in this journal the other reasons which made me a thief, the simplest being the need to eat, though revolt, bitterness, anger or any such similar sentiment never entered into my choice. With fanatical care, “jealous care", I prepared for my adventure as one arranges a couch or a room for love; I was hot for crime.
I GIVE the name violence to a boldness lying idle and hankering for danger. It can be seen in a look, a walk, a smile, and it is in you that it sets up its eddying. It unnerves you. This violence is a calm that disturbs you. One sometimes says: “A mug with class!” Pilorge's delicate features were of an extreme violence. Their delicacy in particular was violent. Violence of the design of Stilitano's only hand, simply lying on the table, still, rendering the repose disturbing and dangerous. I have worked with thieves and pimps whose authority carried me away, but few showed themselves really bold, whereas the one who was most so — Guy — was without violence. Stilitano, Pilorge and Michaelis were cowards. Java too. Even when at rest, motionless and
The Thief's Journal 3