The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  The act went on until the moment came when Paul could stand it no longer and begged her for a taste. Now she had him at her mercy; now his revolting greed could be chastised.

  “Gérard, fancy a boy of sixteen abjectly begging for a crayfish! Could anything be lower? Honestly, you know, he’d lick them off the mat; he’d grovel for them. No, don’t you take it to him; let him come and fetch it! The great sissy, he’s simply too revolting—he’s dying of greed but he can’t be bothered to budge. He shan’t have a crayfish. I’m too ashamed of him.”

  Then, if the spirit moved her, she would mount her tripod and give one of her famous impersonations of the Sibyl.

  Paul would block his ears, or seize a book and start to read aloud, preferably from Saint-Simon or Charles Baudelaire. Deaf to the Oracle, he would say: “Listen, Gérard,” and declaim:

  J’aime son mauvais goût, sa jupe bigarrée,

  Son grand châle boiteux, sa parole égarée,

  Et son front rétréci

  —little realizing how magically the stanza evoked the room, the beauty of Elisabeth.

  Meanwhile Elisabeth had seized a paper. In a voice intended as a parody of Paul’s, she started to declaim the gossip column. The more Paul tried to shut her up, the louder rose her chant behind the screen of newspaper. But she was blind as well as barricaded.

  Seizing his opportunity, Paul shot an arm out; before Gérard could stop him, he hurled a glass of milk at her.

  “The wretch! The beast!”

  Rage choked her. The soaking paper stuck to her like an adhesive plaster; the milk streamed over her in rivulets. But Paul should not have the satisfaction of reducing her to tears.

  “Here a minute, Gérard,” she went on. “Give me a hand, get a cloth, help me mop it up, chuck this paper in the kitchen.” Then, lowering her voice: “And I was just going to let him have some crayfish…. Want one? Look out, the milk’s still dripping. Where’s the cloth? I’m much obliged.”

  The burden of the crayfish came muffled to Paul’s ears. Sleep was stealing over him. Crayfish had become a matter of indifference. Already he had weighed anchor. He had slipped the cable, cast overboard the ballast of his waking appetites; bound hand and foot, was launched upon the Stygian tide.

  Now for the climax, the crucial situation she had labored to maneuver into being, with the sole purpose of disrupting it. Once sure of having worn him down beyond recovery, she got up, came over to his bedside, and placed the salad bowl upon his knees.

  “Go on, Horror. I’m not as mean as all that. You’re welcome to your crayfish.”

  Alack for him his head lay heavy on the tide of sleep; his swollen eyelids were fast sealed; his lips were drawing breath now in another air than man’s.

  “Go on, eat up. You said you wanted it, and now you don’t. Now’s your last chance, I’m off.”

  Then, like a severed head making a supreme last effort at communication, Paul opened his mouth a fraction.

  “Well, if this doesn’t take the cake! Hi! Paul! Here’s your precious crayfish.” She peeled one, inserted it between his jaws.

  “He’s chewing in his sleep! Do look, Gérard. It’s most peculiar. The greedy pig! He really is the end.”

  Her nostrils dilated, the tip of her tongue protruding, as if engrossed in scientific experiment, she went on feeding him. Intent, preoccupied, and mad she looked—a madwoman hunched over a dead child and cramming it with food.

  Of this instructive session, Gérard retained one imprint and no more: namely, the moment when Elisabeth had addressed him for the first time by the familiar “tu.”

  Next morning, in mortal fear of getting his face slapped, he brought himself to make the self-same overture, feeling a pang of strangely sweet disturbance to find it tacitly accepted.

  THE ROOM prolonged its rites into the small hours. This made for late awakenings. At eleven o’clock Mariette brought in the morning coffee. They left it untouched and went to sleep again. Next time she called them, cold coffee seemed an uninviting prospect. The third time, they were past getting up. The coffee, skin and all, was finally rejected, and Mariette bidden to pop downstairs to the newly opened Café Charles and bring back drinks and sandwiches.

  She would have preferred to practice the arts of a good Breton cook, but she had learned to subordinate her habits and wishes to their whims.

  Occasionally, however, she got after them, chased them into the dining-room, and forced them to sit down to a square meal.

  Elisabeth would slip a coat on over her nightdress and sink down in a dream, one elbow on the table, her hand propping her cheek, in a pose reminiscent of some allegorical female figure symbolizing Science, or Agriculture, or the Seasons. Paul lolled beside her, sketchily attired. They ate silently, like strolling players taking a rest between performances. The empty hours of daylight weighed on them. They felt the tug of the current carrying them towards night, towards renewal, life, the Room.

  Mariette was adept at keeping a room clean without disturbing its essential chaos. From four o’clock until five, she sewed. Lastly, having left them a cold supper, she went home. This was Paul’s hour for roaming the deserted streets, for pursuing any girl whose form or features might suggest her prototype in Baudelaire’s sonnet.

  Alone at home, Elisabeth went on leaning, standing, sitting in disdainful attitudes. She never left the house except to buy surprises, hurrying home to hide them. She wandered uneasily from room to room, sick with the horror of one room, one room where lay a body: an anonymous dead woman, not the mother she remembered and who still lived on within her.

  At fall of night, her restlessness increasing, she advanced into the dead center of the room and stood at attention, her arms along her sides, staring ahead of her through the engulfing shadows. The room was sinking, about to be submerged; and she too was sinking, motherless. She stood like a captain on the bridge and let herself go down.

  BEYOND the boundaries of the ordinary world of lives and houses, unguessed, undreamed of in their commonsense philosophy, lies the vast realm of the improbable: a world too disordered, so it would seem, to hold together for a fortnight, let alone for several years. And yet these lives, these houses continue to maintain a precarious equilibrium in defiance of all laws of man and nature. All the same, persons who base their calculations on the inexorable pressure of the force of circumstance assume, correctly, that such lives are doomed.

  The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies, but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heart-rending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition. And yet, all started harmlessly, in childish games and laughter….

  Thus in the rue Montmartre, three years, monotonous and unremittingly intense, passed by. Elisabeth and Paul, incapable of growing up, went on rocking their twin cradles. Gérard loved Elisabeth. Elisabeth and Paul adored, devoured each other. Regularly once a fortnight, after some nocturnal quarrel, Elisabeth packed a bag and was off to live in a hotel.

  Night after stormy night, followed by heavy-lidded mornings; then the long afternoons on which they drifted, drowsy, blind as moles. Sometimes Elisabeth took Gérard for her escort, while Paul went hunting on his own; but nothing that they saw or heard belonged to them as individuals. They were inexorably compelled to carry back the sweets they rifled, to feed the common store of honey.

  They had no inkling, this orphaned penniless pair, that they were outlaws, living on borrowed time, beyond the battle, on fate’s capricious bounty. It seemed to them no more than natural that Gérard’s uncle and the doctor should continue to provide for them.

  Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils but cannot wear them plausibly. These children had been born so rich that nothing in the way of worldly riches could possibly have changed their lives. Had they inherited a fortune overnight, they would have been immune from it.

  Indolent, frivolous, they were the liv
ing refutation of the Puritan ideal, the living exemplar of these words of the philosopher: vital essences, volatile, indifferent, drinkers at the sacred fount.

  They had as little instinct for planning, study, job-hunting, wire-pulling, as a pampered lapdog has for guarding sheep. In the newspapers, they read the crime reports and nothing else. Uncontainable in any social framework, they were of that tribe that New York reforms at home and banishes for choice to Paris.

  When, therefore, to the consternation of Paul and Gérard, Elisabeth suddenly announced her intention of looking for a job, she was in no way moved by practical considerations. She was sick, she declared, of being a drudge. Paul could look after himself. In any case, she was nineteen; her health was going to pieces; she would not stand it a day longer.

  “You see, Gérard,” she declared, “Paul’s got no ties, and besides, he’s useless, he’s no good, he’s a half-wit, practically mad. I’ll have to fend for myself. Besides, what’s to become of him if I don’t work? I must earn my living. I shall get a job. I must.”

  Gérard understood. It had just dawned on him that the stern opening bars of a new theme were sounding in the room. All ready to be gone, Paul lay embalmed, the passive victim of this unfamiliar onslaught.

  “Poor kid,” she went on, “he does need help. You see he’s really not much better. The doctor … (No, it’s all right, Giraffe, he’s asleep) … the doctor’s awfully worried about him. He’ll never be able to go back to school again. It’s not his fault; I’m not blaming him; it’s just that I’ve got a chronic invalid on my hands. To think that one snowball, one little snowball, could do him in like this.”

  “Devil! Devil!” thought Paul. He went on feigning sleep; but a nervous twitch betrayed his agitation.

  Solicitously, finger on lip, Elisabeth bent over him, then presently began again, turning the screws with expert fingers, stressing the pathos of his present state. When Gérard protested, pointing out how well he looked, how much he had grown, how strong he was, she countered with his greed, his spinelessness, his slackness.

  Finally, unable to contain himself a moment longer, he stirred, as if beginning to wake up. At once she changed the subject, in honeyed accents asked him what he wanted.

  Paul was now seventeen years old. This many a month he could have passed for twenty. He had outgrown sugar, outgrown crayfish. It was time, his sister thought, to raise the stakes.

  Sleep having placed him at a disadvantage, a change of tactics seemed to Paul advisable. He made a sudden charge. At once she switched from plaintiveness to rank abuse. He was a worm, a downright tramp. He’d be the death of her. She wouldn’t put it past him to set up as a pimp and let her walk the streets.

  She for her part was nothing but a windbag, a figure of fun, a useless fatuous old donkey.

  These epithets compelled her to abandon speech for action. She besought Gérard to introduce her to a woman of his acquaintance, head of one of the great fashion houses. She would be a salesgirl.

  GÉRARD introduced her to the dressmaker, who was staggered by her beauty. Unfortunately, however, all salesgirls must know foreign languages. She could only be engaged as a mannequin. She would be in good hands: there happened to be another orphan, Agatha, in their employ; Agatha would keep an eye on her.

  Salesgirl? Mannequin? Between the two Elisabeth could see no difference in status. On the contrary, her début as a mannequin seemed to her tantamount to being launched, or almost, as an actress. The agreement was concluded and had a further notable result. She had expected Paul to be upset; and in fact, for a number of obscure reasons, he did quite genuinely fall into transports of rage and indignation, waving his arms, shouting that he didn’t fancy being the brother of a high-class tart, that he’d sooner see her on the streets.

  “I’d rather not,” retorted Elisabeth, “I might run into you.”

  “My poor girl,” sneered Paul, “take a look at yourself in the glass. You’ll only make an exhibition of yourself. You’ll be out on your fanny within an hour. Mannequin, indeed! Stick yourself up as a scarecrow. That’s more your line.”

  To be a mannequin requires a harsh apprenticeship; the first day is as terrifying, as humiliating, as one’s first day at school. Emerging from a long dark tunnel, Elisabeth stepped up on to the dais, under the glaring arc-lamps. Convinced that she was hideous, fearing the worst, she flamed among the other sophisticated, jaded models in all her untamed alien beauty. Enviously they stared, started to whisper among themselves; but something about her gave her immunity from open persecution, and they decided to ignore her. She found her isolation a sore trial. She watched the others and tried to copy their way of bearing down on a prospective client, as if about to demand a public apology, then at the last moment turning disdainfully away. But she was not the fashionable type. She was depressed by the boring frocks they made her model. She became Agatha’s stand-in.

  A warm affection—for Elisabeth a hitherto unknown emotion—grew up gradually between the two motherless girls, uniting them in a friendship that was to prove fatal to them both. They were both social misfits. Whatever moments they could snatch from modeling they spent together, curled up in their white smocks on divans strewn with model furs, exchanging books and confidences, and generally acting as a mutual tonic.

  So all the wheels began to turn; the parts to be assembled began to travel, with smooth coordination, stage after stage, to their appointed ends: one moment more, and Agatha was in the Room.

  Elisabeth had half hoped that Paul would register some protest. She had warned him that the girl had a silly name. But on the contrary, Paul said, the name Agatha was illustrious: it had been immortalized in one of the most beautiful poems in the French language.

  THE PROCESS by which Gérard had been drawn, through Paul, towards Elisabeth was now operating, less deviously, in the case of Agatha, and drawing her, through Elisabeth, to Paul. Paul found the presence of Agatha disturbing. Unpracticed in the art of self-analysis, he classified her as delicious, and left it at that.

  In fact, what he had done was to bestow upon Agatha the vague prolific fantasies which had silted over Dargelos. This struck him with the blinding force of a revelation, one evening when the two girls were in the Room. The treasure was on view, and Elisabeth explaining it, when Agatha seized the photograph of Dargelos dressed as Athalie and cried:

  “Have you got my photograph?” in a voice so strange that Paul lifted his head from his sarcophagus and stayed reclining on his elbows in the pose of Les jeunes Chrétiens d’Antinoé.

  “It’s not your photograph,” replied Elisabeth.

  “No, I see it isn’t; the clothes are different. But it’s incredible, the likeness to an old one of me. I’ll bring it. It’s exactly the same—me, me!—the living image. Who is it?”

  “It’s not a girl, duck. It’s that fellow I told you about, the one at Paul’s school who threw the snowball…. You’re perfectly right; he is like you. Paul, is he like Agatha to look at?”

  At these words, the likeness which, till now, he had managed to suppress, burst ineluctably across the threshold. Gérard recognized the fatal profile. Agatha turned towards Paul, holding up a rectangle of white; and it was Dargelos Paul saw against the shadows, brandishing the snowball, about to strike him down.

  He let his head fall back and answered faintly: “No, my girl, no. The photograph has got a look of you, but you’re not really like him in the least.”

  This patent lie made Gérard anxious. The resemblance absolutely hit one in the face.

  In truth, there were buried levels of his spirit which Paul preferred to leave untouched. The mine was rich and deep, loaded with unimaginable treasure: he was afraid of his own clumsiness. Delicious was not a term applicable to anything below the crust of that volcano, whose heady vapors numbed his ravished senses.

  From that night on, the loom of Paul-and-Agatha began to weave a crisscross pattern. The wheel of fortune had come round full circle; pride had had its downfall; proud Dargel
os of the marble heart, insensible to love, had suffered metamorphosis, was now a shy young girl whom Paul could wholly subjugate.

  Elisabeth thrust the photograph back in the drawer. Next morning she found it on the mantelpiece. She frowned. She made no comment, but her thoughts raced ahead. In a flash she realized that all Paul’s pin-ups—glamor girls, gunmen, sleuths, and all—were prototypes of Agatha and Dargelos-Athalie.

  A nameless consternation strangled her. “It’s the limit,” she told herself, “he’s double-crossing me. He’s cheating.” She decided to pay him back in his own coin, to play up Agatha at Paul’s expense while feigning to ignore their goings-on.

  The aura of family likeness in the Room was an indubitable fact, although, had it been pointed out to Paul, he would have been astonished. His pursuit of one physical type was quite unconscious. And yet its fascination for him and the fascination he himself unwittingly exerted on his sister drove two straight lines through the disorder of their lives, lines destined to meet as inexorably as in a theorem by Euclid; like those two lines which, starting inimically at the base, converging, form the apex of the classic Grecian pediment.

  Agatha and Gérard had established their right to co-tenancy of this unlikely Room, or rather of this gipsy camp; for that was what it was gradually coming to resemble. The horse was lacking, but not the ragged children. Elisabeth suggested that Agatha should come to live with them. Mariette could get the spare room ready—“Mummy’s room,” the room of standing alone, of remembering, of waiting to be swallowed up in darkness. But Agatha had no such melancholy associations with it; a thorough cleansing and a lamp or two would make of it a pleasant bedroom.

  Gérard helped Agatha to bring along some suitcases. The domestic habits, the wakings and the sleepings, the quarrels, the storms, the calms, the café and its sandwiches, were hers already.