The Black Herald Magazine, 2025
Translation by Tobias Ryan of Les Saintes huiles de Jean Genet. De lait, de sperme et de fumée, paru dans la NRF (n°633, 2018) et Mettray (N°14, 2021),
in The Black Herald Magazine
Ill. Un chant d’amour (J. Genet)
“Thanks to a chance encounter with a friend’s bookshelves, I am led back to the infatuation those bushy burial mounds, Our Lady of the Flowers and Miracle of the Rose, brought on. Again, I wander the escapee’s maze of Jean Genet, allowing myself to roam dreamily through an enclosure surrounded by the high walls of a language that is punctured with loopholes, meandering at the discretion of images raised by tramping the brush of those tales. And suddenly I am convinced of a convergence, of which here I am the collecting vessel, between the voices of two characters that have possessed me for some time: that of Normandy Carmelite and that of a martyred, holy actor.
Let’s propose, then, the not-at-all farfetched hypothesis that Jean Genet had suckled on the flowery prose of Thérèse of the Child Jesus, one of the most famous virgin lovers of his youth, and, in particular, selected passages from the best-seller, Story of a Soul. And before you start laughing, recall that, as a teenager, the young nun had been infatuated with a widely-talked-about killer, to the point of wanting to save him, if not from the scaffold then at least from damnation. The murderer thus became the first soul she captured – her first child, as she wrote. Henri Pranzini was the monster’s name, and Maurice Pilorge that of the imaginary Genetian lover. Two minor stories in a newspaper. Two robber-killers of their mistresses or lovers. The guillotine as the gates of heaven. So many ingredients to awaken a passion for salvation – and for writing.
In any case, for my part, I began to recognise in those two children the movement which animates those who want to save souls on the verge of dying, and wish for death and salvation, finding, in the soon to be guillotined, ideal dolls, ones who, being able, proliferate relics – here are legends with witnesses, writings. Mystics, lovers of the dead in reprieve and writers: there truly is a convergence of those who exalt and undermine established orders, invaginating themselves in, rather than shattering, them, through the escape promised by their shared fascination with the ineluctable: this second birth of transgression which some call salvation…”