I did not get my first jimmy from a yegg, I bought it in a hardware store. It was short and solid, and, from the time of my first robbery, I held it as dear as a warrior his weapons, with a mysterious veneration, as when the warrior is a savage and his weapon a rifle. The two wedges, which lay next to the jimmy in a corner of my room—the corner quickly became magnetic, hypnotic—lightened it and gave it that air of a winged prick by which I was haunted. I slept beside it, for the warrior sleeps armed.

For my first burglary I chose a few houses in Auteil and looked up the names of the tenants in the phone book.1I had decided to operate as luck would have it. I would break in if nobody was home. I casually passed the concierge’s window in the first apartment house. In my trousers, against my thigh, were my jimmy and wedges. I started on the fifth floor so as to run less risk of being disturbed. I rang once. No one answered. I rang twice. Finally I set up a peal that lasted two minutes so as to be sure the apartment was empty.

If I were writing a novel, there might be a point in describing the gestures I made, but the aim of this book is only to relate the experience of freeing myself from a state of painful torpor, from a low, shameful life taken up with prostitution and begging and under the sway of the glamour and charm of the criminal world. I freed myself by and for a prouder attitude.

I had trained myself by breaking open doors in safe places, my own door and those of my friends. I therefore carried out the present operation in quick time, perhaps three minutes. Time enough to force the bottom of the door with my foot, insert a wedge, force the top with the jimmy and insert the second wedge between the door and the jamb, move up the first wedge, move down the second, wedge the jimmy near the lock, and push . . . When the lock cracked, the noise it made seemed to me to resound through the building. I pushed the door and went in. The noise of the lock as it gives way, the silence that follows and the solitude that always besets me will govern my criminal entrances. These are rites, the more important as they are inevitable and are not mere adornments of an action whose essence is still mysterious to me. I entered. I was the young sovereign who takes possession of a new realm where all is new to him but where there surely lurks the danger of attacks and conspiracies, a danger hidden along the road he takes, behind every rock, every tree, under the rugs, in the flowers that are tossed and the gifts offered by a people invisible by virtue of their number. The entrance was large. It heralded the most sumptuous home I had ever seen. I was surprised that there were no servants. I opened a door and found myself in the big drawing-room. The objects were waiting for me. They were laid out for the robbery, and my passion for plunder and booty was inflamed. To speak properly of my emotion I would have to employ the same words I used in describing my wonderment in the presence of that new treasure, my love for Bulkaen, and in describing my fear in the presence of the possible treasure, his love for me. I would have to allude to the trembling hopes of the virgin, of the village fiancée who waits to be chosen, and then to add that this light moment is threatened by the black, pitiless, single eye of a revolver. For two days I remained in the presence of Bulkaen’s image, with the fearful shyness of one who carries his first bouquet in its lace-paper collar. Would he say yes? Would he say no? I implored the spiders that had woven such precious circumstances. Let their thread not snap!