conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Funeral Rites about Paris, Public, Assistance with the genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France's leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau.$$$His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief's Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid's (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). the author died in 1986.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Funeral Rites
  The two boys felt the presence of the seated woman. She was blonde, commonplace, but her make-up was fresh and quite became her. Had she not been there, the captain would have handled the two rookies better. Flowing from her deep, limpid eyes, from her smile, from each of her gestures, or given off, rather, like the smell from a flower, that corolla of black silk in which her pink crossed legs were knotted stigmata, the femininity of that pink, clever doll spread through the office and disconcerted the males. None of the three was quite in possession of himself. Their quivering created around each of them an aura of desire, pride, and vanity that became tangled in that of the other two. They had stage fright as the motionless typist stared at them. The two kids gravely took their revolvers from the leather holsters, and Riton said:
  They answered at the same time, whereupon the captain swept up with one hand two pairs of handcuffs lying on the table and with the same quick gesture tossed one to Riton and the other to his pal.
  As they left, the handcuffs in Riton's hand made the metallic sound that for years had been for him the sound of misfortune, and immediately a tremendous sadness clouded his heart. Handcuffs are the indispensable accessory of an arrest. They are so powerful a symbol of it that the sight of them in even the friendly hands of certain cops is enough to make me feel, not fear, but, as it were, the reflection of a great grief. Riton felt like running away. Since the handcuffs were open in his free hands, it was, so it seemed for two seconds, because he was released from them. For the first time, the victim held and was frightened by the knife of the sacrificer. This ambiguity did not last. A great force hardened him. The feel of that contrivance in his hand, in the presence of a woman, made a little man of him. He put the handcuffs in his pocket, saluted, and left without any betrayal of his emotion. The kids had the courage not to stop when they got outside, but Riton's walk grew heavier, his strides were slower and longer. Though he had just received an investiture, the sign had, above all, metamorphosed him into his own enemy.
  He said: "I can't count how many times they slapped the bracelets on me! It's my turn now. I'd like to stick 'em on a cop."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Funeral Rites
  The two boys felt the presence of the seated woman. She was blonde, commonplace, but her make-up was fresh and quite became her. Had she not been there, the captain would have handled the two rookies better. Flowing from her deep, limpid eyes, from her smile, from each of her gestures, or given off, rather, like the smell from a flower, that corolla of black silk in which her pink crossed legs were knotted stigmata, the femininity of that pink, clever doll spread through the office and disconcerted the males. None of the three was quite in possession of himself. Their quivering created around each of them an aura of desire, pride, and vanity that became tangled in that of the other two. They had stage fright as the motionless typist stared at them. The two kids gravely took their revolvers from the leather holsters, and Riton said:
  They answered at the same time, whereupon the captain swept up with one hand two pairs of handcuffs lying on the table and with the same quick gesture tossed one to Riton and the other to his pal.
  As they left, the handcuffs in Riton's hand made the metallic sound that for years had been for him the sound of misfortune, and immediately a tremendous sadness clouded his heart. Handcuffs are the indispensable accessory of an arrest. They are so powerful a symbol of it that the sight of them in even the friendly hands of certain cops is enough to make me feel, not fear, but, as it were, the reflection of a great grief. Riton felt like running away. Since the handcuffs were open in his free hands, it was, so it seemed for two seconds, because he was released from them. For the first time, the victim held and was frightened by the knife of the sacrificer. This ambiguity did not last. A great force hardened him. The feel of that contrivance in his hand, in the presence of a woman, made a little man of him. He put the handcuffs in his pocket, saluted, and left without any betrayal of his emotion. The kids had the courage not to stop when they got outside, but Riton's walk grew heavier, his strides were slower and longer. Though he had just received an investiture, the sign had, above all, metamorphosed him into his own enemy.
  He said: "I can't count how many times they slapped the bracelets on me! It's my turn now. I'd like to stick 'em on a cop.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'They embraced each other like two brothers, two children'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: They embraced each other like two brothers, two children. They immediately moved away from the men on duty and spoke in low voices.
  I know the answer. I miss neither Mettray, which was at the time as frightful to me as the camp to Paulo, nor the state prison. Those years of unhappiness carpet the depths of our memory with a kind of moss and shadow into which I sometimes let myself sink, where I feel I can find a refuge when life gets rough, but innumerable confused desires also arise out of those disrupted depths, desires which, if one knows how to go about it, can be formulated so as to compose a group of movements which will make one's life beautiful and violent. I venture an image. Those years deposit within us a mud in which bubbles form. Each bubble, which is inhabited by an individual will to be, develops and changes, alone and in accordance with the other bubbles, and becomes part of an iridescent, violent whole that manifests a will issuing from that mud. In my fatigue between waking and sleeping, between pain and what combats it (a kind of will to peace, I think), I am visited by all the characters of whom I have spoken and others too who are not clear to me. They seem to emerge from limbo, that is, from a region where bodies are imperfect, misshapen, somewhat plastic, like clay figures in the hands of children... "to emerge from limbo." It's worse, they have just emerged from one of those chapels that surmount burial vaults in cemeteries. I am not asleep. I know that they are informed of Jean's doings out there, in his death. They live in the tomb to which they return.
  Let us continue the account of the events on the rooftops. Anxiety prevented the sergeant from sleeping. He got up during the night and made the rounds of the apartment. In the bedroom, the three soldiers were sleeping on the bed in a tangle that the most indulgent of men would have regarded as scandalous, but it was fatigue alone that thus entangled the soldiers at the edge of the grave. He entered the dining room, carefully directing the beam of his flashlight. At his feet he saw the sight I have depicted. Riton was sleeping with his arm out and his hand almost entirely buried in the trousers of the sleeping Erik.
  At daybreak, when they were awakened, caution obliged the soldiers to remain sitting where they were lest their walking make a sound that would worry the tenants on the floor below. Nevertheless, they would have liked to explore the conquered rooms that were still warm with the life of the occupants who had fled. Apartments offer themselves to the burglar with painful immodesty. Without looking for them, we find the very personal habits of the bourgeois, and I can say for a fact that I have opened drawers in which there were underpants with shit stains, and hard, dried, crumpled socks that emitted their sad fragrance when spread out. I have even found abandoned fragments of shit in the drawers of elegant commodes. For a long time I thought that women are the dirtier, but actually men are. As for the imagination of both, it's on a par with that of the police. If they have hidden the hundred francs in a fold of the window curtain, under a pile of sheets, or behind a frame, their mind is at rest. At rest, except for the mortal anxiety that is the very stuff of their life when they are more than fifty feet away from the hoard. But who am I to talk, since I piss in the sink, I forget turds that I leave in old newspapers in the wardrobes of hotel rooms, and I don't have the guts to leave my money in my room for an hour. I walk with it, I steal with it, I sleep with it.
  The soldiers did not wash themselves. Nothing came out of the taps. The lack of water made them panicky. There was hardly any left in their canteens. The sergeant allowed them to talk in an undertone, for the noises of day drowned out their murmuring. Their blond hair was in their eyes, and at the comer of their eyelids were bits of white mucus. It was a miserable awakening. The apartment seemed the domain of death to the soldiers. It was as disturbing to be there as in certain regions where the land is mined, where snakes bulge their delicate throats, where rose-laurels grow. We were afraid. Not of the danger but of the accumulation of fateful signs. At each window the sergeant posted a man who could fire on the insurgents. Then he divided the day's food into eight equal parts. Although he did not want to talk about it, he twice made smiling remarks about Riton to Erik, which showed that he knew what had happened. Erik smiled and, in the presence of his joking comrades, admitted the night's adventure. There was no scandal. They laughed a little and were silently amused as they looked at the kid whose beauty was suddenly revealed to them. He was squatting on the bed and eating bread with chocolate. Riton bit into the chocolate and took a canteen in order to drink, but Erik snatched it from his hands. The child's astonished eyes looked into his. Erik murmured with a gentle laugh as he handed the canteen back to him without having drunk:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Erik's mouth was speaking, breathing on the kid's shoulder. And his back kept thrusting. His eyes, which he had kept closed, opened on those of Riton. It's banal to say: "Those eyes have beheld death." Yet such eyes do exist, and after the ghastly encounter, the gaze of the men who possess them retains an unwonted hardness and brilliance. Without wanting to speak too long in this tone about the eye of Gabes and create a confusion close to punning, I wish to say that Jean's eye became funereal to me. When I stretched out on his back, when I went farther down, I sharpened my tongue to a very fine point so as to burrow neatly into that crack which was as narrow as the eye of a needle. I felt myself being (I've got him by the ass!)... I felt myself being there. Then I tried hard to do as good a job as a drill. As the workman in the quarry leans on his machine that jolts him amidst splinters of mica and sparks from his drill, a merciless sun beats down on the back of his neck, and a sudden dizziness blurs everything and sets out the usual palm trees and springs of a mirage, in like manner a dizziness shook my prick harder, my tongue grew soft, forgetting to dig harder, my head sank deeper into the damp hairs, and I saw the eye of Gabes become adorned with flowers, with foliage, become a cool bower which I crawled to and entered with my entire body, to sleep on the moss there, in the shade, to die there.
  In my memory, that purest of eyes was decked out with jewels, with diamonds and pearls arranged in the form of a crown. It was limpid. Erik's eyes: Erik had known the snows of Russia, the cruelty of hand-to-hand fighting, the bewilderment of being the only survivor of a company; death was familiar to his eyes. When he opened them, Riton saw their brilliance despite the darkness. Remembering all of Erik's campaigns, he also thought very quickly: "He's been face to face with death." Erik had stopped work. His eyes kept staring; his mouth was still pressed against Riton's. "I now have the impression I love you more than before." This phrase was offered to me three months ago by Jean, and I put it in the mouth of a militiaman whom a German soldier has just buggered. Riton murmured:
  No tenderness could have been expressed, for as their-love was not recognized by the world, they could not feel its natural effects. Only language could have informed them that they actually loved each other. We know how they spoke to each other at the beginning. Seeing that neither understood the other and that all their phrases were useless, they finally contented themselves with grunts. This evening, for the first time in ten days, they are going to speak and to envelop their language in the most shameless passion. A happiness that was too intense made the soldier groan. With both hands clinging, one to the ear, the other to the hair, he wrenched the kid's head from the steel axis that was getting even harder.
  Then he drew to him the mouth that pressed eagerly to his in the darkness. Riton's lips were still parted, retaining the shape and caliber of Erik's prick. The mouths crushed against each other, linked as by a hyphen, by the rod of emptiness, a rootless member that lived alone and went from one palate to the other. The evening was marvelous. The stars were calm. One imagined that the trees were alive, that France was awakening, and more intensely in the distance, above, that the Reich was watching. Riton woke up. Erik was sad. He was already thinking of faraway Germany, of the fact that his life was in danger, of how to save his skin. Riton buttoned his fly in a corner, then quietly picked up the machine gun. He fired a shot. Erik collapsed, rolled down the slope of the roof, and fell flat. The soldiers in the hideout neither heard the fall nor noticed the oddness of the shot. For ten seconds, a joyous madness was mistress of Riton. For ten seconds, he stamped on his friend's corpse. Motionless, with his back against the chimney and his eyes staring, he saw himself dancing, screaming, jumping about the body and on it and crushing it beneath his hobnailed heels. Then he quietly came to his senses and slowly made his way to other rooftops. All night long, all the morning of August 20, abandoned by his friends, by his parents, by his love, by France, by Germany, by the whole world, he fired away until he fell exhausted, not because of his wounds but with fatigue, as sweat glued desperate locks of hair to his temples. For a moment, he was so afraid of being killed that he thought of suicide. The Japanese, according to the papers, advised their-soldiers to fight on even after death so that their souls could sustain and direct the living.... The beauty of that objurgation (which shows me a heaven bursting with a potential activity and full of dead men eager to shoot) impels me to make Riton utter the following words:
  She sat down on her cot, still wearing her wreath at a rakish angle. Sleep crept up on her as she sat there holding her faded daisy and rocking her leg. When she woke up, late in the night, a moonbeam was shining through the window and brightening a patch of the threadbare rug. She stood up and quietly, piously, laid the daisy on that grave. Then she undressed and slept until morning.