Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

Author:Jean Genet
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

“So you're going? And you're taking Our Lady? You're mean. And selfish!”

“Look, angel, I'll see you later. I'm in a hurry today.”

Divine kissed the palm of her hand, blew toward Mimosa (despite her smile, Divine's face suddenly took on the seriousness of the lady on the Larousse covers who scatters dandelion seed to the winds), and she went off as on the arm of an invisible lover, that is. heavy, weary, and transported.

When she said that Our Lady was proud and, upon learning that Mimosa had swallowed his photo, that he would have been more kindly disposed toward her, Divine was mistaken. Our Lady is not proud. He would have shrugged his shoulders, without even smiling, and simply said:

“The chick works hard. Now she's gulping down paper.”

Perhaps this indifference was due to the fact that Our Lady felt nothing the way Mimosa did and did not imagine that anyone could feel a thrill by literally incorporating into himself the picture of a desired human being, by drinking him down, and he would have been incapable of recognizing in this an act of homage to his virility or beauty. Let us conclude from this that he had no desire of this kind. Yet, as we shall see, he was veneration itself. As for Divine, remember that she once answered. Mimosa: “Our Lady will never be too proud. I want to make of him a statue of pride,” thinking: “I want him to be molded of pride,” and further: “molded in pride.” Our Lady's tender youth (for he had his moments of tenderness) did not satisfy Divine's need to be subjected to brutal domination. The ideas of pride and statue very rightly go hand in hand, and with them the idea of massive stiffness. But we can see that Our Lady's pride was only a pretext.

As I have said, Darling Daintyfoot no longer came to the garret, and had even stopped meeting Our Lady in the grove of the Tuileries. He did not suspect that Our Lady knew all about his cowardly doings. In her garret, Divine lived only on tea and grief. She ate her grief and drank it; this sour food had dried her body and corroded her mind. Nothing–neither her own personal care nor the beauty parlors–kept her from being thin and having the skin of a corpse. She wore a wig, which she set most artfully, but the net of the underside showed at the temples. Powder and cream did not quite conceal the juncture with the skin of the forehead. One might have thought that her head was artificial. In the days when he was still in the garret, Darling might have laughed at all these embellishments had he been an ordinary pimp, but he was a pimp who heard voices. He neither laughed nor smiled. He was handsome and prized his good looks, realizing that if he lost them he would lose everything. Though the difficult charms employed in making beauty hold fast did not excite him, they left him cold and drew no cruel smile.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.