The gap between Les Bonnes (1947) and the journal (1948) on the one hand and Le Balcon on the other represents a turning point in [Genet's] life. The crisis was obviously of some magnitude and to a large extent it must have been prompted by [Sartre's] Saint Genet, whose revelations doubtless proved too much for a Genet unused to being the object of such sustained and merciless analysis—so much of it relating to Genet's private life as homosexual and criminal and all of it embarrassingly accurate…. Certainly, no one who has made a thorough study of Genet's work could doubt that Sartre's chart is at least very close to the truth. But Saint Genet follows Genet's progress only up to 1951 and, in Genet's later work, from 1956 onwards, it is clear that old preoccupations are still being aired, that the search for what I have termed "solitude" is far from...