The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

“Me nuts!”

  “Yes, you. What a nuisance you are. Can’t you let a fellow get a bit of sleep?”

  “Some people could do with a bit of sleep themselves, but oh, dear no! They have to listen to the row other people make.”

  “What row?”

  “A damned awful row.”

  “Idiot!”

  “I was going to tell you something—some very exciting news. But as I’m an idiot, I won’t bother.”

  He pricked up his ears. Exciting news? … But he smelled a rat. He wasn’t going to let himself be caught so easily.

  “You can keep your old news,” he said. “I couldn’t care less.”

  She undressed. Neither of them knew the meaning of embarrassment in the presence of the other. This room they shared was as it were a shell in which they lived, washed, dressed together as naturally as if they were twin halves of a single body.

  She put a plate of cold beef, some bananas, and a glass of milk on a chair beside his head; then fetched herself a bottle of ginger-beer and a few sweet biscuits, got into bed, and opened a book. She read, munched on in silence until Paul spoke, suddenly devoured by curiosity, requesting to be told the doctor’s verdict; not that this interested him qua medical opinion: it was the news—presumably somehow connected with it—that he was angling for.

  Elisabeth went on munching, her eyes glued to the page, while she considered her dilemma. She was reluctant to enlighten him; yet a point-blank refusal might be unwise. Finally, she flung at him, on an offhand note: “He said you wouldn’t be going back to school.”

  Paul closed his eyes. Intolerable vistas yawned before him, with Dargelos vanishing down all of them, Dargelos forever elsewhere, irrevocably absent from the future. The pain was too sharp; he cried out:

  “Lise!”

  “Well?”

  “Lise, I don’t feel well.”

  “What’s the matter now?”

  She got up, stumbled; one leg had gone to sleep.

  “What is it you want?”

  “I want … I want you to stay by me, near my bed.”

  The tears streamed down his face. He wept as very young children weep, in a welter of tears and snot, his lower lip pushed forward. She dragged her bed across the kitchen floor, close up to his, got into bed again, reached for his hand across the chair that separated them, and started to stroke it.

  “There,” she said. “There … who’s a silly billy? You tell him he’s never going back to school, and he boohoos. Just think! … We needn’t ever budge from this room now. We’ll have nurses dressed in white, the doctor promised me, and I’ll never leave you except to go out for sweets or books.”

  Still the tears poured down, streaking his drenched wan face and splashing on the pillow.

  Puzzled, taken aback, she bit her lip, said:

  “Are you in a funk?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “Are you as keen on lessons as all that?”

  “No.”

  “Then what on earth … ? Listen, blast you.” She shook him by the arm. “Would you like to play the Game? Do wipe your nose. Look at me. I’m going to hypnotize you.”

  Dilating her eyes to the utmost she leaned over him.

  Paul wept and sobbed. Elisabeth was beginning to feel tired. She wanted to play the Game, to hypnotize him; she longed to comfort him; she would have liked to understand. But sleep was bearing down on her, sweeping her mind with broad dark beams like headlights across snow, obliterating all her efforts.

  By the following day the household had been radically transformed and reorganized. Calling at five-thirty with a box containing a nosegay of artificial Parma violets, Gérard found himself admitted by a trained nurse in a white uniform. Elisabeth was greatly taken by the flowers.

  “Do go and see Paul,” she urged him, unequivocally cordial. “I’m busy at the moment—I’ve got to superintend Mummy’s injection.”

  Washed, with his hair brushed neatly, Paul looked almost blooming. He asked for news from school. The news was shattering.

  Dargelos had been summoned that morning by the headmaster for further interrogation. He had lost his temper and answered back in so insolent a fashion that the headmaster had leaped from his armchair and threatened him with his clenched fist. Whereupon Dargelos had pulled a bag of pepper from his pocket and flung the contents full in the headmaster’s face.

  The consequences had been so instantaneous, so appalling, that the panic-stricken Dargelos had bounded forthwith on to a chair, in the manner of one facing the savage onrush of some cataclysmic flood and making an instinctive bid for safety. From this advantageous position he had witnessed the spectacle of a blind old man tearing at his collar, bellowing, rolling on the table, and displaying every symptom of raving lunacy. This was the scene which had greeted the dumbfounded proctor when, startled by the sounds of uproar, he had come hurrying to the rescue: a raving madman, and Dargelos perched on his chair, stupefied, just as he had been after throwing the snowball.

  The headmaster had been removed to hospital, and Dargelos had been sentenced—not to death, since schoolboys are exempt from the supreme penalty—but to expulsion. He had crossed the courtyard with his head high, with a ferocious scowl; he had shaken hands with no one.

  Needless to dwell on Paul’s reactions to this shocking story…. But, since Gérard had been at pains to suppress any tendency to crow, it would clearly be unseemly to parade his anguish. He tried to control himself but could not, and presently he said:

  “Do you know his address?”

  “No, old boy, I don’t. Fellows like him never let on where they hang out.”

  “Poor Dargelos! That’s that, then. Go and get the photographs.”

  Gérard found two behind the bust and handed them to Paul. One was a school group showing the whole class ranged according to height, with Paul and Dargelos on the left of the housemaster, squatting side by side. Arms folded, arrogant, posed like a footballer, Dargelos displayed those legs which had so notably contributed to his prestige. The other photographs showed him dressed as Athalie—a rôle he had set his heart on playing in a recent school performance of Athalie in honor of St. Charlemagne’s Day. Tigerish beneath his veils and tinsel draperies, he looked like some great tragic actress of the late nineteenth century.

  The entrance of Elisabeth disrupted a scene of pious reminiscence.

  “In with it now, I think, don’t you?” said Paul, waving the second photograph.

  “What? Where?”

  “Into the treasure.”

  “What’s to go into the treasure?”

  Her brow darkened. The treasure was holy, not to be trifled with. She was jealous of its sanctity and of her rights in it.

  “If you agree,” said Paul. “It’s the fellow who chucked the snowball—his photograph.”

  “Let me see.”

  For a long time she studied it in silence.

  “He chucked the snowball,” went on Paul. “He threw pepper at the headmaster. He’s been expelled.”

  Elisabeth continued to pace up and down, biting her thumbnail, rapt in silent contemplation and debate. Finally, she opened the drawer a fraction, pushed the photograph inside, closed it again.

  “It’s a bad face,” she said. “Mind you don’t tire Paul, Giraffe.” (This was their pet name for Gérard.) “I must go back to Mummy. I’ve got to keep an eye on the nurses. It’s awfully difficult, you know. They’re trying to get the upper hand. I daren’t leave them for a moment.”

  Half in earnest, half in self-derision, she made a histrionic gesture of running her fingers through her hair; then, turning, swept from the room as if manipulating an imaginary train.

  THANKS TO the doctor, the children's lives now conformed to a somewhat less abnormal pattern. They themselves, however, cared nothing for conventional amenities; those they enjoyed were theirs alone, and not of this world. Only Dargelos could have persuaded Paul to go back to school. With Dargelos cast forth, the Lycée Condorcet had become a prison.
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  For the rest, Dargelos’ prestige was beginning to undergo a subtle change of scale. Far from dwindling, his figure was expanding, beginning to take off into the upper reaches of the Room. Those sunken eyes, those lips, so coarse, that lock of hair, those clumsy hands, those knees and all their scars, were becoming separate stars of one great constellation, spinning, turning, in interstellar vacancy. In short, Dargelos had gone into the treasure to rejoin his photograph. Image and original were identified; the prototype had lost his function. As an abstraction, as the ideal of a handsome fellow, Dargelos became a valuable property, potent in the magic zone; and thus delivered of him, Paul reveled freely in the sweet delights of sickness and perpetual holiday.

  As for the Room, the efforts of the nurses proved unavailing to subdue it. On the contrary, the wilderness spread rapidly, and before long the patient had succeeded in imposing his personal town and landscape upon chaos. Streets wound in and out among the litter; trunks flanked his broad avenues; strewn papers were his lakes; piles of discarded linen were his mountains. All these Elisabeth with a murmur of “Laundress … waiting …” would pounce on and demolish, rejoicing in the havoc she created, the atmosphere of perpetually impending storm which was the breath of life to both of them.

  Gérard called every day, to be greeted with volleys of foul language, which he accepted meekly with a smile. Prolonged familiarity with their technique of welcome had rendered him immune. Indeed, the words flung at him had come almost to caress his ears. Then they would burst into hoots of laughter, comment derisively on his “stiff upper lip,” and make a great show of conspiratorial giggling and whispering.

  But Gérard had the whole performance taped. Unshaken, tireless in the pursuit of his investigations, he went on combing the Room for traces of some new caprice already under seal of secrecy. Thus one day he came upon these words, printed in soap upon the mirror: Suicide is a mortal sin.

  Clamorous affirmation, stamped indelibly, but doubtless assumed by the children to be no more visible than a scrawl in water, the slogan—symbolic equivalent, no doubt, of the mustache that decked the bust—bore witness to some rare lyric mood whose secret none might share.

  Then, at some clumsy thrust of Gérard’s, Paul would abandon him for worthier quarry and apostrophize his sister, sighing: “Ah, you wait till I’ve got my own room.”

  “You wait till I’ve got mine.”

  “Fine sort of room that’s going to be!”

  “Better than yours! I say, Giraffe, he’s going to have a chandelier …”

  “Shut up!”

  “And a sphinx, Giraffe, he’s going to have a plaster sphinx on the mantlepiece, and he’s going to give his Louis XIV chandelier a coat of paint.” She collapsed with laughter.

  “Perfectly true, I do intend to have a sphinx and a chandelier. You wouldn’t understand, of course, you’re too ignorant.”

  “O.K., I’m off. I shall take a room in the hotel. I’ve got my bag already packed. I shall go and live in the hotel. He can look after himself. I simply refuse to live here any more. I’ve packed my bag. I’m not going to live with the great oaf a moment longer.”

  The performance ended invariably with Elisabeth sticking out her tongue, raining kicks on the planned chaos of the model city, and storming off. Paul would spit after her retreating back. She would bang the door, was presently to be heard banging other doors.

  Paul was subject to occasional brief spells of sleepwalking, whose recurrence, far from alarming his sister, filled her with delight; for they and they alone compelled this nitwit she was saddled with to leave his bed.

  The moment she saw a pair of long legs appear and start to move in a certain way, she would become transfixed, intent, holding her breath to watch, while before her paced a living statue, prowling, adroitly maneuvering, then climbing back into bed, and settling down again.

  Suddenly their mother died—a shock that stunned them. Thinking her immortal, they had treated her with scant consideration; but nevertheless they loved her. To make matters worse, they felt they were to blame; for she had died all unbeknown to them, while they were quarreling in her room, the very evening when Paul got up for the first time.

  The nurse was in the kitchen. The row degenerated into an exchange of blows; with cheeks aflame, Elisabeth had fled to seek sanctuary beside her mother’s chair. She found herself confronted by an unknown woman staring at her with wide open tragic eyes and mouth.

  She had been surprised by death, perpetuated in such a pose as death alone conceives of: hands clenched, arms rigid along the chair arms. The doctor had foreseen that the end would come without warning; but the children, alone, transfixed by this sudden counterfeit, this puppet in place of a live person, this stranger with the mask of a sculptured sage, gazed on it livid, stone-still before its petrified stare, its cry of stone.

  The haunting image was not soon to fade. A time of bewilderment ensued, of tears and mourning, of Paul’s relapse, of words of comfort spoken by the doctor and by Gérard’s uncle; a time also of practical support in the shape of a trained nurse. These crises having been surmounted, the children found themselves once more alone together.

  Far from bequeathing them a distressful legacy, their mother did much, by her fabulous death, to raise her credit in her children’s estimation. It was as if a thunderbolt had forged an image of her, acceptably macabre, entirely unrelated to the person whom they missed. Moreover, in matters of bereavement, creatures so primitive, so uncorrupted, are unaware of social usage. Their reactions are animal, instinctive; and orphaned animals are notoriously cynical in their approach to death. The vanished mother is not mourned for long: once gone, never to return, from her accustomed place, her absence is accepted. And yet, by virtue of her one last freakish stroke, she was to manage, after all, to impress herself upon the memory of her children. Besides, the Room craved marvels. This death of hers, indubitably a marvel, forged her a sarcophagus, a Gothic monument, enshrined her in the Room; was duly to translate her into the eternity of dreams, into their magic heaven, with pride of place.

  PAUL’S RELAPSE was dangerous, prolonged. Mariette, the nurse, a dedicated character, took charge. The doctor had become a martinet. He insisted upon plenty of rest, plenty of nourishment, no excitement. He made himself financially responsible, visited them regularly with strict injunctions, came back again to see that these were carried out.

  At first Elisabeth had been recalcitrant, aggressive, but before long she found herself unable to resist Mariette’s plump rosy face, her silver curls, and her unshakable, if sorely tried, devotion. She was an unlettered peasant, whose inmost heart was given to a grandson in her native Brittany. Thus, love had taught her to decipher the mysteries of childhood.

  The average upright citizen would have found Paul and Elisabeth preposterous, would doubtless have invoked their tainted heredity—one aunt insane, an alcoholic father—to help explain them. Preposterous they were, indeed; so is a rose; so are the solemn arguments of average, upright citizens. But in her perfect simplicity Mariette grasped the inapprehensible. The climate of innocence was one in which she felt herself at home. She had no wish to analyze it. She discerned in the Room a transparency of atmosphere too pure, too vital to harbor any germ of what was base or vile, a spiritual altitude beyond contamination. She sheltered them beneath her wing with an instinctive maternal response to the demands of genius, and with an artless wisdom that enabled her to respect, as if by divination, the creative genius at work within the room. For it was indubitably a masterpiece these children were creating; a masterpiece devoid of intellectual content, devoid—this was the miracle—of any worldly aim; the masterpiece of their own being.

  Paul, one need scarcely add, wasted no opportunity of manipulating the thermometer and generally exploiting his ill-health. Abuse from Elisabeth produced no reaction whatsoever; he remained impassive, mute.

  She sulked; she withdrew into scornful silence. When this palled, she gave it up and presented herself in the bran
d-new rôle of shrew turned ministering angel. Tiptoeing about, speaking just above a whisper, opening and closing doors with infinite discretion, prodigal of self-giving, she ministered to Paul in the spirit of one compassionately dedicated to the care of feeble-minded paupers.

  She decided to become a hospital nurse, to take lessons in nursing from Mariette. She shut herself up for hours on end with the mustachioed plaster bust; also some torn shirts, cotton-wool, gauze, and safety-pins. Coming into the unlit room, Mariette would see the bust staring at her in the darkness from some unexpected angle, ghastly, haggard, its head swathed in bandages. Each time she saw it she nearly died of fright.

  The doctor congratulated Elisabeth upon a transformation which seemed to him miraculous, no less.

  And she continued to sustain it; gradually, stubbornly, to make a substance of her seeming. For nothing in our hero and our heroine was conscious; no notion crossed them, even faintly, of the external impression they produced. They lived their dream, their Room, fancying they loathed what they adored. They went on planning to have separate rooms, but it occurred to neither of them to move into the empty one. To be more accurate, Elisabeth had given the project one hour’s consideration; but the memory of the dead woman, now sublimated in the Room itself, was more frightening in that bedroom. She told herself she could not leave the patient and remained with him.

  On top of everything else, Paul now had growing pains. Penned in the sentry-box he had constructed out of pillows, he complained of cramps. Elisabeth would take no notice, would steal away, finger on lip, with the gait and tread of a young man creeping home stealthily in the small hours, shoes in hand; whereupon, with a shrug, Paul would resume the Game.

  In April he got up. He could no longer stand. His new-born legs collapsed beneath him. To Elisabeth’s extreme annoyance, he was now half a head taller than herself: she retaliated by adopting the demeanor of a saint, rushing to support him, to lower him into his chair, covering him with wraps—in short, reducing him to the status of a gouty old dotard.