disputable indecency, and even the allusion to the "metaphysics of sex etc., so often timidly employed as a kind of excuse, is completely lacking here. In fact, these sections of "wildly foolish" sexuality do not make up the most indecent part of these Complete Works-since one cannot understand why assassins, thieves, and embezzlers are generally depicted as homosexuals, or rather pseudo-homosexuals (since from experience one can say that this important difference passes quite unperceived by heterosexual readers). On the contrary, it is especially the primitive and vicious surroundings, proper to Genet, which are elaborated with a monotony so singular that to make the reader lose his orientation and his spirit and slight erotic interest as well. He surrenders before this extreme and dangerous anarchism which runs like a red thread through the pages of Genet and leads to shameful errors. a complete loss of the capacity to accept the good and the evil of this world in a spirit of sanity and realism. The writer Genet, perverted in this sense, places himself by his attitude almost in the class of the mystics who, no more than he, show little taste for a life of sanity and reality. Thus the come and go of open accounts on Genet is as rich in bias as in hypocrisy. Finally one can only derive profit who in advance has become more familiar with the biases and hypocrisies than with a somewhat doubtful morality, even if not so unhealthy.

As if he had need for a collection of particular examples for his horrors of defective humanism, Genet presents his characters "hard" homosexuals, that is, pure blood. But the homosexuality which we know is not that at all. It succeeds at the most, and that quite involuntarily, in bantering the sexual schizophrenia proper to assassins. prostitutes, and other criminals. It

has borrowed a little of the unstable and nervous life of the extra-legal who yield to sexual attractions under all their possible forms and whose existence is reduced to the present moment. However, Querelle is especially much more an abstract homunculus born of the mad and fantastic imagination of its creator than a living person of flesh and bone.

The fruits of such a tour de force do not hold the attention. After a secular and traditional law, they fall on each homosexual as bitter as gall. And even if he affirms that he is not the ferocious beast "a la Genet", no one wishes to believe him-for such a one is in no condition to believe him after reading the Oeuvres Completes. The association of ideas, "homosexuality-crime", already so strongly held among our fellow-citizens who are "serious-minded", is given a soaring flight by Genet and opens the way to new possibilities for dicrimination against homosexuals. The non-conformist Genet, has, to his shame, built his literary career at the expense of thousands of men for whom the right to existence is already in question, an existence which is little more than that of a pariah.

The pornographic stories and anarchic ideas of Genet, for which even certain homosexual media create a noisy publicity, represent only an evil influence for those who have worked and struggled for years for an ideal, certainly contained in the so solemnly proclaimed Rights of Man, but not recognized by a truly human "humanity". That situation will not be changed in the near future, thanks now also to the literary ambition and the commercial sense (for we should not forget the relation between the latter and fashion) of Monsieur Jean Genet. One cannot even condemn him-one should have pity for him.

Translated by T. M. M.