It is by Harcamone that I am taken there, that I am transported beyond the appearances I had attained at the molting-time of which I have spoken. My faith in Harcamone, my devotion to him and my profound respect for his achievement strengthened my bold will to penetrate the mysteries by performing the rites of the crime myself, and it must have been my abhorrence of the infinite that accorded me this faith and trust. If we are free—available—and without faith, our aspirations escape from us, as light does from the sun, and, like light, can flee to infinity, for the physical or metaphysical sky is not a ceiling. The sky of religions is a ceiling. It ends the world. It is a ceiling and screen, since, in escaping from my heart, the aspirations are not lost; they are revealed against the sky, and I, thinking myself lost, find myself in them or in the images of them projected on the ceiling. Abhorring the infinite, religions imprison us in a universe as limited as the universe of prison—but as unlimited, for our hope in it lights up perspectives just as sudden, reveals gardens just as fresh, characters just as monstrous, deserts, fountains; and our more ardent love, drawing greater richness from the heart, projects them on the thick walls; and this heart is sometimes explored so minutely that a secret chamber is breached and allows a ray to slip through, to alight on the door of a cell and to show God. Harcamone’s crimes—the earlier murder of the girl and, closer to us, the murder of the jailer—will appear to be foolish acts. Certain slips of the tongue in the course of a phrase give us sudden insight into ourselves by substituting one word for another, and the unwelcome word is a means whereby poetry escapes and perfumes the phrase. These words are a danger to the practical understanding of discourse. In like manner, certain acts. Faults sometimes—they are deeds—produce poetry. Though beautiful, these deeds are none the less a danger. It would be difficult for me—and impolite—to present a report here on Harcamone’s mental faculties. I am a poet confronted with his crimes, and there is only one thing I can say: that those crimes gave off such a fragrance of roses that he will be scented with them, as will his memory and the memory of his stay here, until our waning days.

And so, when he killed the guard, Harcamone was taken to a special cell, where he remained until the hearing in the Criminal Court, and it was not until late afternoon, after the death sentence, that he was placed, for the forty-five days of the appeal period, in the death-cell. It was from that cell, where I see him as a kind of Dalai Lama, invisible, potent and present, that he emitted throughout the prison those waves of mingled joy and sadness. He was an actor whose shoulders bore the burden of such a masterpiece that one could hear the creaking. Fibres tore. My ecstasy was shot through with a slight trembling, with a kind of wave-frequency that was my alternate and simultaneous fear and admiration.