The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.
Illustrated portrait of Inspector Bernardini

A character in The Thief’s Journal

Inspector Bernardini

A Marseille police figure who makes the authority capable of punishing Genet part of the narrator’s erotic world.

What they want in Genet’s retrospective narration

To retain institutional command while conducting a private intimacy across the line between policeman and thief.

The book

Cover of The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet
The Thief’s JournalJean Genet, 1949

Jean Genet turns theft, prisons, sex, betrayal, and wandering through Europe into a defiantly beautiful literary autobiography.

View the book

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Bernardini is a police or secret-police figure connected with Marseille who becomes Genet’s lover or intimate fascination. His presence collapses the simple opposition between criminal and policeman.

Genet is drawn to the badge, official posture, and threat of domination even though Bernardini belongs to the institutions that arrest and punish men like him. The attraction shows how power can be resisted and desired at the same time.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • Controlled appearanceA restrained suit or period coat makes authority visible without theatrical menace.
  • The badge mattersOfficial insignia carries erotic meaning for Genet because it represents lawful power over him.
  • Intelligent reserveThe narrator associates him with calculation rather than the blunt force of Armand.
  • Private and official at onceIntimacy never fully removes the institutional difference between them.
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

The remembered relationship ends without a detailed later-life account. Its importance lies in making authority itself part of Genet’s desire.

If you like The Thief’s Journal

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Jean Genet

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline

    Louis-Ferdinand Céline

    The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Claude McKay

    Claude McKay

    Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Gertrude Stein

    Gertrude Stein

    Writer, collector, and host of the rue de Fleurus salon where modern art and the Lost Generation were curated in the same room.

    View author
Back to The Thief’s Journal