Funeral Rites by Jean Genet Page A

German, I shall suffer more and my love will be exalted. In like manner, Christians love more when they suffer more. And the sentence, “My grief at Jean's death revealed to me the force of my love for him,” can be replaced by “My grief at the death of my virtue revealed to me the force of my love for it.” The desire for solitude, which I spoke of briefly a few pages back, is pride. I want to say a few words about the admirable solitude that accompanied the militiamen in their relations with Frenchmen and with each other and finally in death. They were considered to be worse than whores, worse than thieves and scavengers, sorcerers, homosexuals, worse than a man who, inadvertently or out of choice, ate human flesh. They were not only hated, but loathed. I love them. No comradeship was possible between them, except in the very rare case when two boys had enough confidence in each other not to fear that the other might inform on him in their marginal world where informing was a matter of course, for, loathed like reptiles, they had assumed the morals of reptiles and made no bones about it. Thus, any friendship between them was uneasy, for each of them wondered: “What does he think of me?” It was impossible for them to pretend that they were acting out of idealism. Who would have believed it? They had to admit: “It's because I was hungry; it's because I'll have a gun and may be able to plunder; it's because I like to squeal, because I like the ways of reptiles; in short, it's in order to find the grimmest solitude.” I love those little fellows whose laughter was never bright. I love the militiamen. I think of their mothers, their families, their friends, all of whom they all lost in joining the Militia. Their deaths are precious to me.
    Members of the Militia were recruited mainly from among hoodlums, since they had to brave the contemptof public opinion, which a bourgeois would have feared. They had to run the risk of being murdered at night on a lonely street, but what attracted us most was the fact that they were armed. So for three years I had the delicate pleasure of seeing France terrorized by kids between sixteen and twenty.
    I loved those tough kids who didn't give a damn about the blighted hopes of a nation, whose distress in the heart of everyone, as soon as he spoke about it, merged systematically with the most beloved being of flesh and blood. And the armed youngsters were perhaps thrilled at moving in the halo of shame with which their treason surrounded them, but there was enough grace in their gazes and gestures for them to seem indifferent to it. I was happy to see France terrorized by children in arms, but even more so because they were crooks and little rats. Had I been young, I would have joined the Militia. I often caressed the handsomest of them, and I secretly recognized them as envoys of mine who had been delegated to operate among the bourgeois and carry out the crimes that prudence forbade me to commit myself.
    At a time when the death of Jean D. ravages me, destroying everything within me or leaving undamaged only the images that enable me to pursue doomed adventures, I want to derive incomparable joy from the spectacle of the love of a militiaman and a German soldier. It was no doubt natural for me to couple a warrior, whom I want to be as subtly cruel as possible, with the person whose moral nature is vilest in the eyes of the world—and sometimes in mine—but how could I justify that with respect to the friend I loved most who had died fighting against my two heroes, fighting against what my two heroes defended? You can't have any doubt about the pain that his death causes me. For a few daysmy despair made me fear for my life. I was so grief-stricken at the thought that Jean had been lying in a narrow grave for four days, with his body decomposing in a wooden coffin, that I was on the point of asking a scientist:
    “Are you sure he can't be brought back to life?”
    I don't see the