Gabriel Jeroschewitz, October 29th 2025, inspired and dedicated to Jean Genet

A tragically comic tone inspired by Jean Genet’s life and sensibility—but it is not a biography. It’s a fictionalized, imaginative tribute, blending history, invention, and irony.

Saints in Cheap Rooms

I met Jean one night in Paris, which no longer exists—though, of course, it never existed except in his imagination and the stains on the floorboards of Montmartre. By then, I was older than he ever intended to become; he, meanwhile, had slipped into legend and was bored by it. “It’s exhausting,” he told me, “to be admired by the right people. I always preferred being adored by the wrong ones.”

He looked disappointingly alive: blue veins under the wrist, nicotine patch on his arm, a slight heretic’s smile. The room was small, yellow, and smelled of vinegar and fear. “They call this a boutique hotel now,” he said. “Once it was a brothel. I can still hear the heels.”

I had been sent by a magazine that believed nostalgia could be monetized to write a piece titled The Last Saint of the Streets. My editor wanted tragedy, perhaps with a whiff of redemption. Jean preferred jokes. “Tragedy is just comedy with a good tailor,” he said, plucking at his shirt. “But you can’t afford either, can you?”

In the beginning, he told me, there was no mother, only paperwork. He was a child of the Republic, property of the state, and had a signature on a form that had lost ink. “They gave me foster parents who loved God more than food. So I stole food. Later, I stole God.”

He laughed—not kindly, but the way an acrobat laughs after surviving a fall. “You can tell a lot about a man by what he steals first.”

At twelve, he was caught taking apples. At thirteen, kisses. By sixteen, he had graduated to identities. He would try on names like other boys on jackets: Jean the Porter, Jean the Pickpocket, Jean the Poet. Only one fit properly, and it was the one he fashioned himself—the Genet who would bloom in the gutters.

“I enjoyed reform school,” he said, as if describing a spa. “Such an efficient place to meet your future readers.”

The files described him as incorrigible. He considered that a compliment, which, in the language of bureaucrats, it was not.

Years later, he began writing in another cell—not out of hope but spite. “You know how others keep diaries to confess?” he told me. “I kept mine to brag.”

He scrawled on brown paper, on the backs of arrest warrants, sometimes on the skin of lovers who slept too long. When the guards burned his first manuscript, he only smiled. “They were my first critics,” he said. “And like all critics, they improved the work by destroying it.”

He spoke of that period as one might talk of a monastic retreat. The other inmates thought he was drafting appeals; he was inventing saints. “All my saints were thieves,” he said. “Because they understood transubstantiation: turning sin into meaning.”

I asked whether he believed in God. “Of course,” he said. “How else could I rebel?”

Jean had a talent for making violence ornamental. He could describe a brawl as tenderly as others describe a wedding. “Prison was my first theatre,” he said, “and the wardens were generous producers. They even provided costumes—uniforms, chains, everything in matching grey.”

He adored men who were bad for him. “It’s not masochism,” he protested. “It’s aesthetics. Villains have better posture.”

Once, he fell in love with a murderer named Maurice, who wept only when shaving. Jean kept his tears in a bottle and later sold them as holy water to a painter from Montparnasse. “They were counterfeit tears, of course,” he said. But then, what isn’t?”

Their affair ended, like most of his affairs, in an arrest and an epitaph written in lipstick. Yet he remembered Maurice with laughter, describing how they used to gamble cigarettes over hymns. “He had such a voice for blasphemy. You could almost believe he meant it.”Fame arrived while he was still pretending not to want it. One morning, two gentlemen of letters appeared at his cell: Cocteau, wearing a silk scarf, and Sartre, wearing an opinion.

Cocteau called him a poet; Sartre called him a phenomenon. Jean called them “clients” and asked if they wanted receipts.

They campaigned for his release. The President signed a pardon. “They say I was freed by literature,” he told me, “but it was paperwork again. Always paperwork.”

Out of prison, he wandered Paris like a ghost who had overslept the apocalypse. Sartre invited him to salons, where people discussed existentialism and ate small sandwiches. Jean pocketed the sandwiches. “If you can’t live up to your reputation,” he said, “you might as well snack.”

Sartre later wrote a seven-hundred-page book about him. Jean never read it. “I already know the ending,” he claimed. “I remain misunderstood—but beautifully so.”In middle age, he grew political, though he insisted it was just another form of erotica. “I love the scent of danger,” he said. “It’s cheaper than perfume.”

He travelled to America and befriended the Black Panthers. “They greeted me as a comrade. I greeted them as a tourist of oppression.” He grinned to show he knew the irony. “At least they had better posture than the French revolutionaries—practice with rifles, you see.”

Later, he supported the Palestinians, scribbling essays that were half love letters, half manifestos. “The world thinks I choose sides,” he said. “But really, I just choose the beautiful losers.”

He claimed solidarity was the purest form of desire. “To march beside someone is to fall slightly in love with their stride.”

In this, he was consistent: the same hunger that made him steal wallets now made him steal injustices. Whatever belonged to others, he adopted—then returned, slightly more tragic and slightly more comic, as art. 

“Being respectable,” he informed me over cheap wine, “is a contagion spread by furniture.”

He refused armchairs and preferred the floor. “Chairs make one complacent, and complacency kills poetry faster than vice.”

Publishers begged him to tone down his work. “They wanted homosexuals who behaved like diplomats,” he said. “I gave them saints who behaved like thieves.”

When television producers proposed an interview, he demanded to appear in drag as the Virgin Mary. They declined. “Another missed miracle,” he sighed.

He liked to walk through respectable neighbourhoods to lower the property values by association. “Every culture needs its scarecrow,” he told me. “I volunteer.”

At this point, dear reader, I must confess my role. I had come to chronicle the legend, not to become part of it. Yet Jean, like quicksand, pulled everything into his orbit—pity, curiosity, even journalistic detachment.

He insisted I accompany him to a dinner thrown by admirers from the university. The evening dissolved into arguments about whether art should liberate or provoke. Jean said it should be embarrassing. “If a book doesn’t make you afraid to hand it to your mother, why bother?”

Midway through dessert, he pickpocketed the dean’s watch, then presented it as a gift to the waitress. “A redistribution of time,” he called it.

That incident cost me my column but gained me this story.

Old age suited him like rust suits iron—it gave him character while threatening to destroy him. He lived in hotel rooms that smelled of damp lace and burned coffee. “Each day,” he said, “I throw out one more illusion. Soon I shall be pure absence.”

He wrote slowly now, his sentences looping like prayer beads. Sometimes he forgot the plot but never the style. “Plot is for readers with errands,” he said. “Style is for those with faith.”

Visitors came hoping for wisdom. He gave them sarcasm; it lasted longer. To a student who asked how to live authentically, he replied, “Stop trying to look authentic. Die anonymous, and they’ll build you a museum.”

His laughter had shrunk to a cough. But when he laughed, the walls still vibrated, as if amused by his persistence.

One winter morning, he decided to die in a hotel he couldn’t afford. “Death should always be an act of theft,” he said. “I’m stealing a few more hours.”

I found him half‑asleep, murmuring to the ceiling. “Tell the concierge,” he whispered, “not to change the sheets. They are holy relics now.”

He refused hospitals—too clean, too sincere. “If I must be purified,” he said, “let it be by dust.”

He asked me to fetch a mirror. “So I can watch myself disappear,” he explained. When I returned, he was already gone, leaving only the mirror fogged with what might have been breath—or irony.

The manager billed me for the room. “He always leaves someone the check,” she said.

The funeral was sparsely attended: a handful of literary critics, two ex-lovers, and one confused tourist who thought it was a performance piece.

The priest hesitated over the eulogy, uncertain whether to emphasize repentance or rebellion. Ultimately, he settled for silence, which Jean would have considered an excellent review.

Afterward, at the café, we debated his legacy. Some called him a prophet of liberation; others, a pervert with a pen. I said he was a comedian who never told the same joke twice.

A critic shook his head. “There’s nothing funny about Genet.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why he’s hilarious.”Years later, I still see him—in the corner of every bar, mocking the respectable ghosts who pretend not to notice him.

Sometimes he stands behind me in the mirror, fixing my tie. “You’re growing tidy,” he warns. “Careful—that’s the first symptom.”

I tell him the world has changed, that his kind of scandal is now mainstream, that nobody goes to prison for love anymore. He smiles. “Then go for something larger. There’s always another crime.”

He was never a hero, and he would have resented being one. Heroes end their stories; clowns keep performing under collapsing tents.

If tragedy is merely comedy that remembers its mortality, then Jean achieved both: he laughed himself into sainthood and sinned himself into laughter.

Coda

I keep his stolen watch on my desk. It runs backward, of course.

Sometimes I wind it, and the seconds tick in reverse—each moment returning to an earlier disgrace, each disgrace glowing a little brighter for being remembered.

I think that was his real miracle: not turning pain into art, but convincing us that pain was already art, if only we looked at it with the right amount of wickedness.

So here’s to the thief who stole redemption and pawned it for a story. Here’s to the saint of cheap rooms, who taught us that even degradation can have good comic timing.

And when my clock finally stops, I hope Jean applauds—from whatever infernal cabaret he haunts—before stealing it outright