To speak of saintliness again in connection with transportation will set your teeth on edge, for they are not used to an acid diet. Yet the life I lead requires the giving up of earthly things that the Church, and all churches, require of their saints. Then saintliness opens, in fact forces a door which looks out on the marvellous. And it is also recognized by the following: that it leads to Heaven by way of sin.

Those who are sentenced to death for life—the “trans-portees"—know that the only means of escaping horror is friendship. By abandoning themselves to it, they forget the world, your world. They raise friendship to so high a plane that it is purified and remains alone, isolated from the creatures who fathered it, and friendship—on this ideal level, in the pure state, as it must be if the lifer is not to be carried away by despair, as one is said to be carried off (with all the consequent horror) by galloping consumption—friendship becomes the individual and very subtle sentiment of love which every predestined man discovers (in his own hiding-places) for his inner glory. Living in so restricted a universe, they thus had the boldness to live in it as passionately as they lived in your world of freedom, and as a result of being contained in a narrower frame their lives became so intense, so hard, that anyone—journalists, wardens, inspectors—who so much as glanced at them was blinded by their brilliance. There the most potent pimps hew out—that’s exactly the word—a dazzling celebrity, and when one feels, behind the wall that is more fragile than the past and equally impassable, the proximity of your world (paradise lost) after witnessing the scene which is as frighteningly fabulous as God’s wrathful threatening of the punished couple, the audacity to live (and to live with all one’s might) within that world whose only outlet is death has the beauty of the great maledictions, for it is worthy of what was done in the course of all the ages by the Mankind that had been expelled from Heaven. And this, in effect, is saintliness, which is to live according to Heaven, in spite of God.