Without thinking myself magnificently born, the uncertainty of my origin allowed me to interpret it. I added to it the peculiarity of my misfortunes. Abandoned by my family, I already felt it was natural to aggravate this condition by a preference for boys, and this preference by theft, and theft by crime or a complacent attitude in regard to crime. I thus resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me. This almost gleeful rushing into the most humiliating situations is perhaps still motivated by my childhood imagination which invented for me (so that I might there squire about the slight and haughty person of an abandoned boy) castles, parks peopled with guards rather than with statues, wedding gowns, bereavements and nuptials, and later on, though just a trifle later, when these reveries were thwarted to the extreme, to the point of exhaustion in a life of wretchedness, by reformatories, by prisons, by thefts, insults, prostitution, I quite naturally adorned my real situation as a man (but first as a humiliated child whom knowledge of prisons was to gratify to the full) with these objects of my desire, these ornaments (and the rare diction pertaining to them) which graced my mental habits. Prison offers the same sense of security to the convict as does a royal palace to a king's guest. They are the two buildings constructed with the most faith, those which give the greatest certainty of being what they are - which are what they are meant to be, and which they remain. The masonry, the materials, the proportions and the architecture are in harmony with a moral unity which makes these dwellings indestructible so long as the social form of which they are the symbol endures. The prison surrounds me with a perfect guarantee. I am sure that it was constructed for me - along with the Law Court, its annex, its monumental vestibule. Everything therein was designed for me, in a spirit of the utmost seriousness. The rigor of the rules, their strictness, their precision, are in essence the same as the etiquette of a royal court, as the exquisite and tyrannical politeness of which a guest at that court is the object...
p. 87
Genet, Jean, 1910-1986. Journal du Voleur, 1949, Gallimard, Paris.
trns. Bernard Frechtman, The Thief's Journal, 1964, Grove Press, New York.
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