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‘1932 Spain at the time was over-run with vermin, its beggars They went from village to village, in Andalusia because it’s hot, in Catalonia because it’s rich, but the whole country was ripe for us So I was a flea, and well aware that I was one In Barcelona we preferred calle Mediodía and calle Carmen Sometimes six of us would sleep on a mattress without sheets and we’d beg in the markets from dawn A gang of us would leave the barrio chino and spread out along the Parallelo, carrying baskets, because housewives were more likely to give us a leek or turnip than a few cents At midday we’d go back and make soup with what we’d collected I am going to describe the customs of that vermin’ Jean Genet,  The Thief’s Journal   *   *   *   After his descent into abjection, Genet decides to embrace his condition and transform it into a supreme virtue He rejects the hierarchy of values of a self-righteous society and turns it on its head: transmutes what is base into something noble and what is noble into something base The process of inner subversion he initiated in Barcelona’s barrio chino will be long and haphazard, and finds expression over the next ten years in his first poetic, narrative works written in Paris’s La Santé prison The young, poverty-stricken lad, brought up in an orphanage, without identity papers, throws himself into theft, prostitution and begging and strives to emulate a criminal’s inveterate hardness with the self-surrender of a man initiating himself in the arcane secrets of a mystic belief and its stony path to spiritual perfection   Fleas, he writes in The Thief’s Journal, were the most visible sign of his worthlessness, as representative of his pariah status as the jewels that adorn aristocrats and the bourgeoisie are of their condition as beautiful people Lovingly cherished rags and sores attract pity and transmute shame into glory in his inner being A pride necessary to withstand the scorn of others, solid and resistant like a rock dividing the