The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  Although disconcerted by this new thrust of hers, he controlled an overwhelming impulse to fight back, and took no notice. Matched against her in a perpetual duel from birth, he had acquired tactical sagacity. Besides, he was too lazy to be otherwise than passive. Elisabeth seethed inwardly. Once more the fight was on; the balance was redressed; the stakes were equal.

  By imperceptible stages, Elisabeth began to take the place in Gérard’s heart once occupied by Paul. Not to be with her was almost unendurable. Strictly speaking, it had been the house in the rue Montmartre, it had been Paul and Elisabeth that he had adored in Paul. But now, inevitably, the spotlight had swung away from Paul to illumine a figure putting off childhood and slipping into its young girlhood, leaving the time of boys’ derision for the time of boys’ desire.

  Cut off by doctor’s orders from the sickroom, he racked his brains for other means of access and finally managed to persuade his uncle to take Lise and the invalid away to the seaside. This uncle was a wealthy, genial bachelor, overwhelmed with executive meetings and business responsibilities. He had adopted Gérard—son of a widowed sister who had died in giving him birth—and had assured his future by a generous provision in his will. The idea of a holiday appealed to him; he needed a little rest.

  Instead of the scathing reception he had expected, Gérard found himself welcomed by a Saint and a Simpleton and showered with thanks and blessings. What could they be up to? Were they preparing to launch a fresh attack? While pondering these matters, he intercepted an exchange of signals—one flash through a lowered saintly lid, one quiver of the nostril from the Simpleton—and realized the Game was on. These manifestations were not aimed at him: he had merely dropped in upon a performance already in full swing. Another cycle had begun: he had only to adapt himself to an unfamiliar rhythm and thank his stars for granting propitious omens for their journey. Such courteous well-bred guests could hardly fail to please their host-to-be.

  They did not fail. In fact, his uncle was quite bowled over by the beautiful dispositions of these ill-reputed friends.

  Elisabeth set herself to charm him.

  “You know,” she simpered, “my little brother’s rather shy….”

  Gérard’s attentive ear caught a muttered “Bitch!” from little brother, but nothing else escaped his lips.

  In the train they had to make heroic efforts to preserve an appearance of composure. Totally unsophisticated as they were, a wagon-lit seemed to them the very peak of luxury; but their natural good breeding and sense of style enabled them to seem perfectly at ease.

  Inevitably, the sleeper conjured up the Room, and the same thought flashed into the minds of both: “We shall be having two rooms and two beds at the hotel.”

  Paul lay motionless. Between lowered lids, Elisabeth traced the outline of his profile, faintly luminous under the blue night-light. In the course of many a deep and stealthy vigil she had become aware of an endemic sloth in him and of the fact that since his recent therapeutic isolation he was gradually succumbing to it. His rather receding chin annoyed her; her own chin was pronounced. She was apt to say: “Paul, your chin!” in the manner of a maternal “Stand up straight!” or “Elbows off the table!” He would crack back at her with some obscenity, but all the same she had caught him more than once before the mirror, busy manipulating the angle of his jaw.

  The year before, she had gone through a phase of sleeping with a clothespin on her nose, with the notion of cultivating a Greek profile. Paul had taken to sleeping half-strangled by a tight elastic band; but discouraged by the red mark it left, he renounced self-martyrdom and settled for a full face or three-quarter presentation.

  They were not concerned with any impression they might make on others. Their experiments were purely for their private satisfaction.

  Removed from the influence of Dargelos, thrown back upon himself by Elisabeth’s withdrawal into silence, deprived of the stimulus of constant squabbling, Paul followed his own bent. Flabbiness set in, a tendency to sag. He started to go soft. She had guessed right. Nothing escaped her; she pounced on every symptom. Loathing everything that smacked of petty indulgences, lip-lickings, fireside coziness, herself all fire and ice, she could not tolerate a lukewarm diet. As in the epistle to the angel of Laodicea: “She spewed it forth from her mouth.” Thoroughbred she was, and Paul too must be a thoroughbred.

  On rushed the train, its human freight asleep beneath a flying tent of vapors rent intermittently by piercing screams; but on this first real journey of her life, deaf to the beat-beat of the turning wheels, to the demented shrieking of the engine, blind to the smoke’s wild mane that flew above them, she sat, this girl, intent upon her brother, searching his face with avid eyes.

  A DISAPPOINTMENT was in store for the young people. They arrived to find all hotels crammed to capacity. Apart from the room reserved for Gérard’s uncle, there remained but one, at the far end of the corridor. It was suggested that the boys should share it, and that Elisabeth should have a camp bed in the adjoining bathroom. What in fact happened was that Elisabeth and Paul took possession of the bedroom, leaving the bathroom to Gérard.

  By nightfall, the situation had deteriorated; Elisabeth wanted a bath and so did Paul. They sulked, raged, turned on one another, flung doors open, slammed them again at random, and ended finally at opposite ends of the same boiling bath, with Paul in fits of laughter. The sight of his seaweed limbs afloat in steam exasperated Elisabeth. An exchange of kicks ensued. Next day, at table, they were still kicking one another. Above the tablecloth their host saw smiling faces; a silent war went on below.

  This subliminal struggle was not the only means by which, unconsciously, they managed to attract attention. The charm was working. Their table was rapidly becoming the focal point of a delighted curiosity. The get-together spirit was, to Elisabeth, anathema. She scorned “the others,” or else fell madly in love with some total stranger. Hitherto the objects of her passion had been selected from the ranks of those matinée idols and Hollywood film stars whose garish outsize masks adorned her walls. The hotel afforded her no scope. The family parties were one and all hideous, gluttonous, and squalid. Their audience consisted of skinny little girls impervious to parental raps, craning their necks from afar to watch the marvelous table, the battle of limbs below, the peaceful countenances above.

  For Elisabeth beauty was nothing but a pretext for ointments, clothespins, distortions, secret masquerades in a scarecrow assortment of bits and pieces. Far from being a heady draft, her present success was merely a new kind of game, a change from the rigors of the Game of yore; she was a white-collar worker on a fishing expedition. They were both on holiday from the Room, from what they called the “convict settlement,” for thus it had come to seem in their imaginations: a prison cell in which they were condemned to live, dragging one heavy chain between them, that prison’s fascination unremembered, its poetic atmosphere (to Mariette so much more precious than to them) depreciated, the Game their only solace and release.

  This new Game started in the dining-room. Elisabeth and Paul went at it, much to Gérard’s horror, under his uncle’s very nose; but the good man saw nothing but the features of twin seraphs.

  The point of the Game was to scare the skinny little girls by sudden facial convulsions. They would wait patiently for the auspicious moment, a moment of general slackening of attention. Then was the moment to catch some tiny tot or other dislocated in her chair and gaping at the table, to transfix her first with a smile, then with a hideous grimace. She would look away in some alarm. They would repeat the treatment until, utterly unnerved, she burst into tears and complained to her mother. The mother then looked towards the table. Elisabeth beamed; the mother beamed responsively; the victim was slapped, scolded, and reduced to silence. The conspirators kept the score by nudging one another. The nudges provoked suppressed attacks of giggles, which included Gérard and finally exploded in the bedroom.

  One evening, as they were about to leave the table, a diminutive
child who had been chewing her way imperturbably through a dozen hideous faces, counterattacked by surreptitiously sticking out her tongue. They were delighted with her; she had actually given the Game a new dimension. They re-enacted their exploits as obsessively as any hunting-and-shooting addict, praising the child, discussing the day’s play, deciding to tighten up the rules. Their verbal duels took on a fresh, more sanguinary lease of life.

  Gérard implored them to go slow, to refrain from leaving the taps turned on, from trying to breathe under water, from chasing one another and brandishing chairs and emitting cries for help. Laughter and blows merged inextricably; for however conditioned an onlooker might be to their emotional somersaults, no one could foresee the moment when these two sundered portions of a single being would cease from strife and become one again: a phenomenon which Gérard both dreaded and desired—desiring it for the sake of his uncle and the neighbors, dreading it because it meant the common front of Paul and Elisabeth against him.

  Presently the Game expanded, invading lounge, street, beach, and esplanade. Elisabeth dragged Gérard in their wake. Crouching, clambering, scuttling, diabolically grinning and grimacing, the gang advanced in all directions. Panic spread. Wry-necked children, agape, with bulging eyes, were towed along by parents, slapped, spanked, incarcerated in their rooms, deprived of outings. Just when the scourge was at its peak, it ceased. The gang had discovered a more diverting occupation: stealing.

  After them reeled Gérard, by this time too unnerved even to formulate his secret terrors. It was stealing not for profit, not out of craving for forbidden fruit, simply for stealing’s sake. Mortal terror was the lure. They accompanied Gérard’s uncle on shopping expeditions, returned with their pockets stuffed full of useless junk. The rules prohibited the theft of useful objects. One day, Elisabeth and Paul tried to make Gérard return a book because it was in French. He won conditional reprieve by agreeing to steal something extremely difficult. “A watering-can, for instance,” declared Elisabeth.

  They dressed him for the occasion in a gigantic cape; and thus accoutred, with a heart of lead, the luckless youth performed his task. What with his clumsiness and the curious excrescence on his person of the watering-can, he made a profound impression on the ironmonger, who stood gazing after the retreating trio in a trance of arrested suspicion and of disbelief. “Hurry! Hurry! Idiot!” whispered Elisabeth, “they’re watching us.” Once round the corner, out of danger, they breathed again and took to their heels.

  A crab appeared in Gérard’s dreams; its pincers had him by the shoulder. It was the ironmonger. He was calling the police. They had come to arrest him. He would be cut out of his uncle’s will, etc.…

  The loot—curtain-rings, screwdrivers, electric switches, labels, outsize gym shoes—went on piling up at the hotel into a sort of imitation treasure, as it were those sham pearls that women wear on holiday, leaving their real pearls at home.

  As far as Elisabeth was concerned, this behavior, as irresponsible as that of untrained children, naïvely cheeky to the point of crime, this inability to distinguish good from evil, this playing at pirates, stemmed from her instinct to save Paul from the flabbiness she dreaded in him. As long as she could keep him harried, scared stiff, grimacing, cursing, tearing up and down, he could not sink into inertia. We shall see where intuition led her before she had done with him and his re-education.

  Then they came home. The ozone they had so casually inhaled had so signally restored them, mind and body, that Mariette found them changed almost beyond recognition. The brooch they brought her as a present was not a stolen object.

  AND NOW the Room, like a great ship, put out to sea. Higher the waves, wider the horizons, rarer, more perilous, the cargo.

  In their strange world of childhood, of action in inaction, as in the waking dream of opium eaters, to stay becalmed could be as dangerous as to advance at break-neck speed.

  Gérard stayed with them whenever his uncle went away on business. They bedded him down on a heap of cushions and covered him with old coats. Opposite him towered the theater of their two beds. Each night, it was the lighting system that set the play in motion. The electric bulb happened to be over Paul’s bed. Each night he covered it with a piece of bunting and plunged the Room in reddish shadow. Each night Elisabeth objected to this partial black-out, jumped out of bed in a fury and removed the bunting. Paul put it back. Then ensued a tug-of-war which ended regularly with Paul triumphant, Elisabeth crushed, the bunting once more hoisted on the lamp. For since their return he had had the upper hand. What she had feared when she had first seen him rise from his bed of sickness, half a head taller than herself, had come to pass: he was no longer content to play the invalid. Her recent efforts to promote his moral welfare were paying dividends far beyond her calculations. In vain she mocked him, saying: “Isn’t it delicious? Remember, Giraffe—everything’s delicious now. Films are delicious, books are delicious, what a delicious armchair, ginger pop and raspberry sodas are simply delicious. I say, Giraffe, isn’t he revolting? Look at him! Look! Preening himself like a peacock!” It was no use; she knew her nursling was a child no longer. He had outstripped her in the race by almost a clear length. The very Room proclaimed it, seeming now to be constructed on two different levels. He was on the top floor, with all his magic properties within effortless reach; but she was consigned to the basement, obliged to dive or grovel ignominiously when she wanted to find hers.

  But presently she hit on new ways of getting even with him. Laying down the weapons of a tomboy, she started to exploit her untried feminine resources, with Gérard for her stooge. She felt she could torment Paul more effectively before an audience; since Gérard came in handy for this purpose, she welcomed and made much of him.

  The curtain rose at eleven o’clock at night. There were no matinées except on Sundays.

  At seventeen, Elisabeth looked her age, no more, no less; Paul, on the other hand, looked four years older than his fifteen years. He was beginning to be seen around the town, to frequent delicious cinemas and music-halls, to pick up delicious girls. To be solicited by a real tart was the most delicious thing of all.

  When he came back he would recount his exploits. He described them with a candor well-nigh insensate, primitive; with a frankness so patently devoid of cynicism or vice that it seemed innocence itself. Elisabeth would tease, cross-question him, then suddenly, unpredictably, take exception to some comparatively harmless detail, and forthwith bridle, grab a paper and retire behind it with a great show of icy concentration.

  Gérard and Paul were wont to meet between eleven o’clock and midnight in one of the big Montmartre cafés, before coming home together. Meanwhile Elisabeth would stalk up and down the corridor in a frenzy of impatience.

  At the sound of the hollow clang of the front door, she would quit her post and scurry back to the Room, to be discovered sitting with a hair net on her head, sticking her tongue out slightly, polishing her nails.

  Paul flung his clothes off; Gérard put on his dressing-gown and was assisted into bed. The genius of the room knocked thrice. The play began. But not one of the protagonists, it must be remembered, not even he who played the sole spectator, was consciously concerned with make-believe. In their archaic unawareness their play became the legend of eternal youth. Without their knowing it, the play—the Room—swung on the edge of myth.

  The strip of bunting cast a ruddy glow upon the set. Naked, Paul wandered up and down, making his bed, smoothing the sheets, plumping the nest of pillows, setting out his stock-in-trade beside him on a chair. Propped on her left elbow, with the stern mask of a Byzantine empress, Elisabeth lay staring at her brother. With her right hand, she scratched her head. Having scratched it raw, she rubbed in ointment from a pot kept for this purpose by the pillow.

  “Idiot!” declared Paul, adding: “If ever there was a sickening sight, it’s that idiot and her grease-pot. She thinks it’s good for the scalp. It’s a tip she got from some Hollywood film mag….”
/>   “Gérard!”

  “What?”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gérard, you’re too patient. Go to sleep, don’t let him be a nuisance.”

  Silence ensued. Paul bit his lips; his eye flashed fire. Wide, dewy, sublime, her gaze enfolded him, until at last he got into bed, tucked himself in, tried out a pose or two against the pillows—not seldom rejecting the whole arrangement and starting again from scratch until he had it absolutely to his liking.

  The ideal state at last achieved, no power could have dislodged him from it. It was less a preparation for sleep than an embalming; in funeral bands, his food and drink and sacred bric-à-brac beside him, he set forth on his journey to the shades.

  Night after night Elisabeth awaited this supreme moment of departure; through four long years, her cue had never altered. Incredible as it might seem, apart from a few trifling variations, the essence of the play had been preserved. It may be that elemental beings such as these follow some law of nature as mysteriously imperative as the law of flowers that close their petals up at night.

  It was Elisabeth who introduced the variations. She thought up any number of surprises. One night, omitting the ritual of the ointment, she dived under the bed and produced a cut-glass salad bowl full of crayfish. Hugging it to her chest with both beautiful bare arms, she gloatingly surveyed the contents, then her brother.

  “Gérard, have a crayfish? You simply must; this dressing’s perfect.” She knew Paul’s passion for dressed crayfish sandwiches. Not daring to refuse, Gérard got out of bed.

  “The old cow!” muttered Paul. “She loathes crayfish. She loathes anything peppery. It’s as much as she can do to get it down.”