Cover

Half Title

Miracle of The Rose

Works By Jean Genet

WORKS BY JEAN GENET

Published by Grove Press

The Balcony

The Blacks

Funeral Rites

The Maids and Deathwatch

Miracle of the Rose

Our Lady of the Flowers

Querelle

The Screens

The Thief’s Journal

Title

Miracle of The Rose

by Jean Genet

Translated from the French

by Bernard Frechtman

GROVE PRESS

NEW YORK

Miracle of The Rose

Miracle of The Rose

OF ALL the state prisons of France, Fontevrault is the most disquieting. It was Fontevrault that gave me the strongest impression of anguish and affliction, and I know that convicts who have been in other prisons have, at the mere mention of its name, felt an emotion, a pang, comparable to mine. I shall not try to define the essence of its power over us: whether this power be due to its past, its abbesses of royal blood, its aspect, its walls, its ivy, to the transient presence of convicts bound for the penal colony at Cayenne, to its prisoners, who are more vicious than those elsewhere, to its name—none of this matters. But to all these reasons was added, for me, another: that it was, during my stay at the Mettray Reformatory Colony, the sanctuary to which our childhood dreams aspired. I felt that its walls preserved—the custodial preserving the bread—the very shape of the future. While the boy I was at fifteen twined in his hammock around a friend (if the rigours of life make us seek out a friendly presence, I think it is the rigours of prison that drive us toward each other in bursts of love without which we could not live; unhappiness is the enchanted potion), he knew that his final form dwelt behind them and that the convict with his thirty-year sentence was the fulfilment of himself, the last transformation, which death would make permanent. And Fontevrault still gleams (though with a very soft, a faded brilliance) with the lights emitted in its darkest heart, the dungeon, by Harcamone, who was sentenced to death.