The end of 1911 saw dramatic happenings. Joseph the Italian, a little militant with frizzled hair who dreamed of a free life in the bush of Argentina, as far away as possible from the towns, was found murdered on the Melun Road. From the grapevine we gathered that an individualist from Lyons, Bonnot by name (I did not know the man), who had been traveling with him by car, had killed him, the Italian having first wounded himself fumbling with a revolver. However it may have happened, one comrade had murdered or "done" another. An informal investigation shed no light on the matter and only annoyed the "scientific" illegalists. Since I had expressed hostile opinions towards them, I had an unexpected visit from Raymond. "If you don't want to disappear, be careful about condemning us." He added, laughingly, "Do whatever you like! If you get in my way I'll eliminate you!"

"You and your friends are absolutely cracked," I replied, "and absolutely finished." We faced each other exactly like small boys over a red cabbage. He was still squat and strapping, baby-faced and merry. "Perhaps that's true," he said, "but it's the law of nature."

A positive wave of violence and despair began to grow. The outlaw anarchists shot at the police and blew out their own brains. Others, overpowered before they could fire the last bullet into their own heads, went off sneering to the guillotine. "One against all!" "Nothing means anything to me!" "Damn the masters, damn the slaves, and damn me!" I recognized, in the various newspaper reports, faces I had met or known; I saw the whole of the movement founded by Libertad dragged into the scum of society by a kind of madness; and nobody could do anything about it, least of all myself. The theoreticians, terrified, headed for cover. It was like a collective suicide. The newspapers put out a special edition to announce a particularly daring outrage, committed by bandits in a car on the Rue Ordener in Montmartre, against a bank cashier carrying half a million francs. Reading the descriptions, I recognized Raymond and Octave Garnier, the lad with piercing black eyes who distrusted intellectuals. I guessed the logic of their struggle: in order to save Bonnot, now hunted and trapped, they had to find either money, money to get away from it all, or else a speedy death in this battle against the whole of society. Out of solidarity they rushed into this squalid, doomed struggle with their little revolvers and their petty, trigger-happy arguments. And now there were five of them, lost, and once again without money even to attempt flight, and against them towered Money - 100,000 francs' reward for the first informer.

They were wandering in the city without escape, ready to be killed somewhere, anywhere, in a tram or a cafe, content to feel utterly cornered, expendable, alone in defiance of a horrible world. Out of solidarity, simply to share this bitter joy of trying to be killed, without any illusions about the struggle (as a good many told me when I met them in prison afterwards), others joined the first few such as red-haired Rene Valet (he too was a restless spirit) and poor little Andre Soudy. I had often met Soudy at public meetings in the Latin Quarter. He was a perfect example of the crushed childhood of the back alleys. He grew up on the pavements: TB at thirteen, VD at eighteen, convicted at twenty (for stealing a bicycle). I had brought him books and oranges in the Tenon Hospital. Pale, sharp-featured, his accent common, his eyes a gentle gray, he would say, "I'm an unlucky blighter, nothing I can do about it." He earned his living in grocers' shops in the Rue Mouffetard, where the assistants rose at six, arranged the display at seven, and went upstairs to sleep in a garret after 9:0o p.m., dog-tired, having seen their bosses defrauding housewives all day by weighing the beans short, watering the milk, wine, and paraffin, and falsifying the labels... He was sentimental: the laments of street singers moved him to the verge of tears, he could not approach a woman without making a fool of himself, and half a day in the open air of the meadows gave him a lasting dose of intoxication. He experienced a new lease on life if he heard someone call him "comrade" or explain that one could, one must, "become a new man." Back in his shop, he began to give double measures of beans to the housewives, who thought him a little mad. The bitterest joking helped him to live, convinced as he was that he was not long for this world, "seeing the price of medicine."

One morning, a group of enormous police officers burst into our lodgings at the press, revolvers in hand. A bare-footed little girl of seven had opened the door when the bell rang, and was terrified by this irruption of armed giants. Jouin, the Deputy Director of the Surete, a thin gentleman with a long, gloomy face, polite and almost likable, came in later, searched the building, and spoke to me amiably of ideas, of Sebastien Faure whom he admired, of the deplorable way in which the outlaws were discrediting a great ideal.

"Believe me," he sighed, "the world won't change so quickly." He seemed to me neither malicious nor hypocritical, only a deeply distressed man doing a job conscientiously. In the afternoon he sent for me, called me into his office, leant on his elbows under the green lampshade, and talked to me somewhat after this fashion: "I know you pretty well; I should be most sorry to cause you any trouble-which could be very serious. You know these circles, these men, who are very unlike you, and would shoot you in the back, basically.... they are all absolutely finished. I can assure you. Stay here for an hour and we'll discuss them. Nobody will ever know anything of it and I guarantee that there'll be no trouble at all for you."

Bonnot's life-history (ten years longer than most of the others), was a classic story of an ordinary working class lad who, after the normal youthful escapades, wanted to settle down into a decent job, get married and have a family. He was frustrated not just by 'bad luck' but by his inability to wield any power over his own conditions of existence.

His early flirtation with anarchism, which might once have been dismissed simply as youthful exuberance, now became a fully- fledged liaison but although his turn to crime may well have been influenced by his new-found anarchist contacts, he must have felt that he had very little to lose; he'd worked for years, done his military service, tried to support a family, and what had he got at the end of it? - nothing. Ideas and theories on the one hand, social experience on the other, it was a dialectical process that produced illegalism, and each individual's particular set of circumstances that produced illegalists.

Their attitudes were more or less formed before they congregated in Paris, although the concentration of comrades doubtless reinforced their ideas, and the arguments between the 'activists' and the 'intellectuals' showed that the former were hardly keen pupils eager to learn from their ideological mentors. If Bonnot and Garnier's scribbled notes contained phrases lifted from the pages of l'anarchie, this was more a case that they saw their own feelings reflected in print. Besides their obvious motivation, they might have lacked opportunity had it not been for Garnier's driving energy and the chance arrival of Bonnot.