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Our Lady of the Flowers
Jean Genet
Our Lady of the Flowers
1949. The present version, which follows the now standard Gallimard text, has been revised and corrected.
Like the former, it is unabridged and unexpurgated.
Were it not for Maurice Pilorge, whose death keeps poisoning my life, I would never have written this book. I
dedicate it to his memory.
Our Lady of the Flowers
Weidmann appeared before you in a five o'clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a
wounded aviator fallen into the rye, one September day like the one when there came to be known the name
of Our Lady of the Flowers. His handsome face, multiplied by the presses, swept down upon Paris and all of
France, to the remotest out.of.the.way villages, in castles and cabins, revealing to the doleful bourgeois that
their daily lives are grazed by enchanting murderers cunningly elevated to their sleep which they will cross by
some back stairway that has abetted them by not creaking. Beneath his picture broke the dawn of his crimes:
murder 1, murder 2, murder 3, up to six, bespeaking his secret glory and preparing his future glory.
A little earlier, the negro Angel Sun had killed his mistress.
A little later, the soldier Maurice Pilorge killed Escudero, his lover, in order to rob him of a little less than a
thousand francs. Then they cut his throat on his twentieth birthday, while, as you will recall, he thumbed his
nose at the outraged executioner.
Finally, a ship's ensign, still a child, committed treason for treason's sake: he was shot. And it is in honor of
their crimes that I am writing my book.
It was only in fragments that I learned of that wonderful blossoming of dark and lovely flowers; one was
revealed to me by a scrap of newspaper, another was casually alluded to by my lawyer, another was
mentioned, almost sung, by the prisoners—their song became fantastic and funereal (a De Profundis), as did
the plaints which they sang in the evening, as does the voice which crosses the cells and reaches me blurred,
hopeless, inflected. At the end of the phrases, it breaks, and that break makes it so sweet that it seems borne
up by the music of angels, of which I feel the horror, for angels fill me with horror, being, as I imagine,
neither mind nor matter, white, filmy and frightening, like the translucent bodies of ghosts.
These murderers, now dead, have nevertheless reached me, and whenever one of these luminaries of affliction
falls into my cell, my heart beats loudly, my heart beats a loud tattoo, if the tattoo is the drum.call announcing
that a city is capitulating. And there follows a fervor comparable to that which wrung me and left me for some
minutes grotesquely contorted, when I heard the German plane passing over the prison and the bursting of the
bomb which it dropped nearby. In the twinkling of an eye, I saw a lone child, borne aloft by his iron bird,
laughingly strewing death. For him alone were unleashed the sirens, the bells, the hundred.and.one cannon
Our Lady of the Flowers
Our Lady of the Flowers
shots reserved for the Dauphin, the cries of hatred and fear. All the cells were atremble, shivering, mad with
terror; the prisoners beat at the doors, rolled on the floor, shrieked, blasphemed and prayed to God. I saw, as I
say, or thought I saw, an eighteen.year old child in the plane, and from the depth of my 426 I smiled at him
lovingly.
I do not know whether it is their faces, the real ones, which spatter the wall of my cell with sparkling mud, but
it cannot be by chance that I cut those handsome, vacant.eyed heads out of magazines. I say vacant, for all the
eyes are clear and must be sky.blue, like the razor's edge to which clings a star of transparent light, blue and
vacant like the windows of buildings under construction, through which one sees the sky from the windows of
the opposite wall. Like those barracks which in the morning are open to all the winds, which one thinks empty
and pure when they swarm with dangerous males, sprawled out promiscuously on their beds. I say empty, but
if they close their eyelids, they become more disturbing to me than are huge prisons to the nubile maiden who
passes by the high barred windows, prisons behind which sleeps, dreams, swears and spits a race of
murderers, which makes of each cell the hissing nest of a tangle of snakes, but also a kind of confessional with
a curtain of dusty serge. Those eyes, seemingly without mystery, are like certain closed cities, such as Lyons
and Zurich, and they hypnotize me as do empty theatres, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts, for
deserts are closed and do not communicate with the infinite. Men with such faces terrify me when I have to
cross their paths warily, but what a dazzling surprise when, in their landscape, at the turning of a deserted
lane, I approach, with my heart racing like mad, and discover nothing, nothing but looming emptiness,
sensitive and proud like a tall foxglove!