The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  THE

  HOLY TERRORS

  BY

  JEAN COCTEAU

  with illustrations by the author

  translated by Rosamond Lehmann

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Part Two

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Warriors

  Dargelos makes a snowball

  The terrible snowball

  Paul is hurt

  In the cab

  Brother and sister

  As if manipulating an imaginary train

  The Room

  The bath for two

  The new game in the dining room

  The loved faces resemble each other

  The husband

  The Chinese city

  Paul and his letter

  Elisabeth finds Paul’s letter

  The washing of the hands

  Dargelos and his poisons

  Elisabeth dreams

  She controls herself

  She pulls the trigger

  PART ONE

  THAT PORTION of old Paris known as the Cité Monthiers is bounded on the one side by the rue de Clichy, on the other by the rue d’Amsterdam. Should you choose to approach it from the rue de Clichy, you would come to a pair of wrought iron gates: but if you were to come by way of the rue d’Amsterdam, you would reach another entrance, open day and night, and giving access, first to a block of tenements, and then to the courtyard proper, an oblong court containing a row of small private dwellings secretively disposed beneath the flat towering walls of the main structure. Clearly these little houses must be the abode of artists. The windows are blind, covered with photographers’ drapes, but it is comparatively easy to guess what they conceal: rooms chock-a-block with weapons and lengths of brocade, with canvases depicting basketfuls of cats, or the families of Bolivian diplomats. Here dwells the Master, illustrious, unacknowledged, well-nigh prostrated by the weight of his public honors and commissions, with all this dumb provincial stronghold to seal him from disturbance.

  Twice a day, however, at half-past ten in the morning and four o’clock in the afternoon, the silence is shattered by a sound of tumult. The doors of the little Lycée Condorcet, opposite number 72b rue d’Amsterdam, open, and a horde of schoolboys emerges to occupy the Cité and set up their headquarters. Thus it has reassumed a sort of medieval character—something in the nature of a Court of Love, a Wonder Fair, an Athletes’ Stadium, a Stamp Exchange; also a gangsters’ tribune cum place of public execution; also a breeding-ground for hazing schemes—hazing to be hatched out finally in class, after long incubation, before the incredulous eyes of the authorities. Terrors they are, these lads, and no mistake—the terrors of the Fifth. A year from now, having become the Fourth, they will have shaken the dust of the rue d’Amsterdam from their shoes and swaggered into the rue Caumartin with their four books bound with a strap and a square of felt in lieu of a satchel.

  But now they are in the Fifth, where the tenebrous instincts of childhood still predominate: animal, vegetable instincts, almost indefinable because they operate in regions below conscious memory, and vanish without trace, like some of childhood’s griefs; and also because children stop talking when grown-ups draw nigh. They stop talking; they take on the aspect of beings of a different order of creation—conjuring themselves at will an instantaneous coat of bristles or assuming the bland passivity of some form of plant life. Their rites are obscure, inexorably secret; calling, we know, for infinite cunning, for ordeal by fear and torture; requiring victims, summary executions, human sacrifices. The particular mysteries are impenetrable; the faithful speak a cryptic tongue; even if we were to chance to overhear unseen, we would be none the wiser. Their trade is all in postage stamps and marbles. Their tribute goes to swell the pockets of the demi-gods and leaders; the mutter of conspiracy is shrouded in a deafening din. Should one of that tribe of prosperous, hermetically preserved artists happen to pull the cord that works those drapes across his window, I doubt if the spectacle thereby revealed to him would strike him as copy for any of his favorite subjects: nothing he could use to make a pretty picture with a title such as “Little Black Sweeps at Play in a White World”; or “Hot Cockles”; or “Merry Wee Rascals.”

  There was snow that evening. The snow had gone on falling steadily since yesterday, thereby radically altering the original design. The Cité had withdrawn in time; the snow seemed no longer to be impartially distributed over the whole, warm, living earth, but to be dropping, piling only upon this one isolated spot.

  The hard, muddy ground had already been smashed, churned up, crushed, stamped into slides by children on their way to school. The soiled snow made ruts along the gutter. But the snow had also become the snow on porches, steps, and house-fronts: featherweight packages, mats, cornices, odds and ends of wadding, ethereal yet crystallized, seemed, instead of blurring the outlines of the stone, to quicken it, to imbue it with a kind of presage.

  Gleaming with the soft effulgence of a luminous dial, the snow’s incandescence, self-engendered, reached inward to probe the very soul of luxury and draw it forth through stone till it was visible; it was that fabric magically upholstering the Cité, shrinking it and transforming it into a phantom drawing-room.

  Seen from below, the prospect had less to recommend it. The street lamps shed a feeble light upon what looked like a deserted battlefield. Frost-flayed, the ground had split, was broken up into fissured blocks, like crazy pavement. In front of every street drain, a stack of grimy snow stood ominous, a potential ambush; the gas-jets flickered in a villainous northeaster; and dark holes and corners already hid their dead.

  Viewed from this angle, the illusion produced was altogether different. Houses were no longer boxes in some legendary theater but houses deliberately blacked out, barricaded by their occupants to hinder the enemy’s advance.

  In fact the entire Cité had lost its civic status, its character of open mart, fairground, and place of execution. The blizzard had commandeered it totally, imposed upon it a specifically military rôle, a particular strategic function. By ten minutes past four, the operation had developed to the point where none could venture from the porch without incurring risk. Beneath that porch the reservists were assembled, their numbers swollen by the newcomers who continued to arrive singly or two by two.

  “Seen Dargelos?”

  “Yes … no … I don’t know.”

  This reply came from one of two youths engaged in bringing in one of the first casualties. He had a handkerchief tied round his knee and was hopping along between them and clinging to their shoulders.

  The question had come from a boy with a pale face and melancholy eyes—the eyes of a cripple. He walked with a limp, and his long cloak hung oddly, as if concealing some deformity, some strange protuberance or hump. But nearing a corner piled with school haversacks, he suddenly flung his cloak back, exposing the nature of his disability: not a growth, but a heavy satchel eccentrically balanced on one hip. He dropped it, ceased to be a cripple; the eyes, however, did not alter.

  He advanced towards the battle.

  To the right, where the footpath joined the arcade, a prisoner was being subjected to interrogation. By the spasmodic flaring of a gas lamp he could be seen to be a small boy with his back against the wall, hemmed in by his captors, a group of four. One of these, a senior boy, was squatting between his legs and twisting his ears, to the accompaniment of a series of hideous facial contortions. By way of crowning horror, the monstrous ever-changing mask confronting the prisoner’s was dumb. Weeping, he sought to close his eyes, to avert his head. But every time he struggled, his t
orturer seized a fistful of gray snow and scrubbed his ears with it.

  Circumnavigating the group, threading a path through shot and shell, the pale boy went on his way.

  He was looking for Dargelos, whom he loved.

  It was the worse for him because he was condemned to love without forewarning of love’s nature. His sickness was unremitting and incurable—a state of desire, chaste, innocent of aim or name.

  Dargelos was the Lycée’s star performer. He throve on popular support and equally on opposition. At the mere sight of those disheveled locks of his, those scarred and gory knees, that coat with its enthralling pockets, the pale boy lost his head.

  The battle gives him courage. He will run; he will seek out Dargelos, fight shoulder to shoulder by his side, defend him, show him what mettle he is made of.

  The snow went flying, bursting against cloaks, spattering the walls with stars. Here and there, some fragmentary image stood out in stereoscopic detail between one blindness and the next; a gaping mouth in a red face; a hand pointing—at whom? in what direction? … It is at him, none other, that the hand is pointing; he staggers; his pale lips open to frame a shout. He had discerned a figure, one of the god’s acolytes, standing on some front door steps. It is he, this acolyte, who compasses his doom. “Darg….” His cry is cut off short; the snowball comes crashing on his mouth, his jaws are stuffed with snow, his tongue is paralyzed. He has just time to see the laughter and within the laughter, surrounded by his staff, a form, the form of Dargelos, crowned with blazing cheeks and tumbled hair, rearing itself up with a tremendous gesture.

  A blow strikes him full on the breast. A heavy blow. A marble-fisted blow. A marble-hearted blow. His mind fades out, surmising Dargelos upon a kind of dais, supernaturally lit; the arm of Dargelos nerveless, dropping down.

  He lay prostrate on the ground. A stream of blood flowed from his mouth, besmearing chin and cheek and soaking into the snow. Whistles rang out. Next moment the Cité was deserted. Only a few remained beside the body, not to succor it but to observe the blood with avid curiosity. Of these, one or two soon made off, not liking the look of things, shrugging, wagging their heads portentously; others made a dive for their satchels and skidded away. The group containing Dargelos remained upon the steps, immobilized. At length authority appeared in the shape of the proctor and the college porter and headed by a boy, Gérard, whom Paul had hailed upon entering the battle, and who had run to fetch them after having witnessed the disaster. Between them the two men took up the body; the proctor turned to scan the shadows.

  “Is that you, Dargelos?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Follow me.”

  The procession started.

  Great are the prerogatives of beauty, subduing even those not consciously aware of it. Dargelos was a favorite with the masters. The proctor felt the whole baffling business to be excessively annoying.

  They bore the victim into the porter’s lodge, where the kindly porter’s wife did her best to bathe him and restore him.

  Dargelos stood in the doorway, backed by a throng of curious faces. Gérard knelt beside his friend, tearfully clasping his hand.

  “Tell me what happened, Dargelos,” said the proctor.

  “There’s nothing to tell, Sir. Some of the fellows were chucking snowballs. I chucked one at him. It must have been a hard one. It hit him smack in the chest and he went ‘Ho!’ and fell down. At first I thought his nose was bleeding from another snowball that had hit him in the face.”

  “A snowball wouldn’t crack a person’s ribs.”

  “Sir, Sir!” cried the boy who answered to the name of Gérard. “He put a stone inside that snowball.”

  “Is that true?” inquired the proctor.

  Dargelos shrugged his shoulders.

  “Haven’t you anything to say?”

  “What’s the use…. Look, he’s opening his eyes. You’d better ask him.”

  The victim was beginning to show signs of life. Gérard slipped an arm under his head, and he lay back against it.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Sorry….”

  “There’s no need to apologize. You’re ill; you fainted.”

  “I remember now.”

  “Have you any idea what made you faint?”

  “A snowball hit me in the chest.”

  “A snowball? Why should that make you faint?”

  “It’s the only thing that hit me.”

  “Your friend has given me to understand that this particular snowball had a stone in it.”

  The patient saw Dargelos shrug his shoulders.

  “Gérard must be cracked,” he said. “You’re cracked. It was just an ordinary snowball. I was running; I expect I sort of blew up.”

  The proctor breathed a sigh of relief.

  Dargelos seemed about to take his leave, then changed his mind and advanced a few paces in the direction of the victim. But when he reached the porter’s counter, on which were displayed such goods as ink, candy, pen-holders, he stopped short, pulled a couple of pennies from his pocket, flung them down, picked up a twist of licorice—the kind so popular with boys, that looks like shoelaces—crossed the hall, raised one hand in a sort of military salute, and disappeared.

  The proctor had already called a cab, intending to see the patient home, but Gérard objected that it was unnecessary. He declared that the sight of the proctor would alarm the family, and that he himself would be his escort.

  “Anyway,” he added, “he’s much better now—you can see.”

  The proctor needed little persuasion. It was snowing hard. The lad’s home was in the rue Montmartre.

  Having seen them into the cab and observed Gérard in the act of removing his cloak and woolen muffler to wrap them round his friend, the proctor concluded that he was justified in washing his hands of further responsibility.

  THE WHEELS turned slowly on the slippery road. Huddled in one corner, Gérard gazed at the head beside him, so pale it seemed to make the farther corner luminous, and bobbing forlornly with the convulsive bobbing of the cab. The closed eyelids were barely visible, the nostrils and lips a shadow merely, still flecked with crusts of blood. He murmured: “Paul….”

  Paul heard; but he was sunk in such leaden lassitude that he could not move his tongue. He slid a hand out of his laprobes and wrappings and put it over Gérard’s.

  A child’s reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him.

  Gérard went on repeating: “Paul’s dying; Paul’s going to die”; but he did not believe it. Paul’s death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever. For though he loved Paul as Paul loved Dargelos, it was by being weak, not strong, that Paul had subjugated him. Dargelos was the flame that drew Paul’s tranced, obsessive gaze; he, Gérard, who was strong and just, must therefore be Paul’s guardian, must watch him surreptitiously, save him each time he seemed about to singe his wings. What a fool he’d been on the porch! … pretending not to notice that Paul was looking for Dargelos, telling himself he’d teach Paul a lesson…. The same compulsion that had hurled the infatuated Paul towards the fray had pinned, transfixed him, Gérard, to the spot. From afar he had seen Paul drop, lie bleeding, senseless, with something in his attitude … in the kind of attitude that seems to warn the frivolous spectator to keep his distance. Then, not daring to approach for fear Dargelos and his gang would keep him away from the authorities, he had taken to his heels and run for help.

  But now once more the customary rhythm was reestablishing its sway; once more he was at his post, watching over Paul. Now he was bearing him away. He was soaring into a dream-world of transcendent ecstasy. The soundless wheels beneath him, the glitter of the street lamps combined with his sense of dedication to weave a magic spell. Pa
ul’s weakness seemed to him to turn to stone, to acquire concrete and finite dimensions, and he felt that, in bearing it, he had found a cause worthy of his strength.

  Suddenly it struck him that he had accused Dargelos. Spite had prompted him to perpetrate an act of malice and injustice. He remembered the porter’s lodge, that shoulder shrugged in scorn, Paul’s blue reproachful eye, Paul’s superhuman effort to declare, “You’re cracked!”—and thus to acquit the culprit. He felt uneasy, tried to dismiss the matter, telling himself by way of self-excuse that a snowball in Dargelos’ iron hands could be a weapon potentially more lethal than his own nine-bladed penknife. Surely Paul would forget the incident. At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.

  On went the cab, jogging through the open firmament. Stars came towards it, splintering the dim shower-whipped windows with fiery particles of light.

  Suddenly a cry was heard, two plaintive notes. Piercing, human they swelled, inhuman; the panes rattled; the fire brigade went storming by. Through chinks in the frosted glass Gérard could discern the bases of the engines, the scarlet ladders, the firemen standing motionless, gold-helmeted in their niches, like allegorical figures on a monument. A ruddy flicker danced across Paul’s face. Gérard fancied him reviving. But the last of the whirlwind passed, leaving him death-pale as before. It was then that Gérard noticed that the hand in his own was warm, and understood that his ability to play the Game stemmed from this link with living warmth.

  The word “Game” was by no means accurate, but it was the term which Paul had selected to denote that state of semi-consciousness in which children float immersed. Of this Game he was past master. Lord of space and time, dweller in the twilit fringes between light and darkness, fisher in the confluent pools of truth and fantasy, he had built himself a kingdom in his classroom, sat at his desk enthroned while Dargelos bowed in homage, obedient to his will.