The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  Every evening, when they had finished work, the girls found Gérard waiting, either to take them for a stroll or to see them home. Mariette prepared the same cold supper; they took it off the table and made a picnic of it; next morning Mariette came back and swept the eggshells up.

  Paul was determined to make the most of this propitious turn of Fortune’s wheel. He had no coat-of-mail arrogance, like Dargelos, to buckle on; but other well-tried weapons lay ready to his hand: in other words, the gentle Agatha became his butt. When Elisabeth flew to her defence, he turned the tables on them, sided with Agatha in order to upset his sister. This paid off nicely for all four of them: for Elisabeth, thus enabled to enlarge the scope of her activities; for Gérard, given a moment’s welcome respite; for Agatha, spellbound by Paul’s insolence; and finally for Paul himself. He was no Dargelos; but insolence has a glamor all its own; and with Agatha’s co-operation, and Elisabeth for target, he found he could exploit it.

  Agatha embraced her rôle with sacrificial ardor, feeling that the Room contained a force of love so potent that though it must intermittently explode, it could not damage her. It set her tingling violently as from electric shock, violent, yet it was positive in its effect, life-giving as the salt wind blowing from the sea.

  Her parents, drug-addicts, had maltreated her and ended by putting their heads in a gas oven. She had been rescued by the manager of an important fashion house, who happened to live in the same apartment house. He introduced her to the head of his firm, who took her on as an apprentice and subsequently as a mannequin. Acquainted as she was with the clenched fist, with malice and abuse, she recognized these portents in the Room, but with a difference. Here they evoked a battering wave, the stinging wind, the bolt that falls at random and in pure wantonness may strip the shepherd.

  The contrast was a basic one, but all the same her experience of drug-addicts had conditioned her to the seamy side of life, to threatening voices, footsteps, broken furniture, cold snacks in the middle of the night. Behavior normally calculated to raise a maiden blush failed to dismay her. The harsh school from which she had emerged had left its mark on her. Something savage lurked around her eyes and nostrils, recalling Dargelos at first sight, his mask of scorn.

  She had ascended into the Room as if into the heaven of her hell. She could live at last; she could draw breath. Nothing worried her; she had no fear that her new friends might take to drugs; their addiction was, she knew, a natural and self-engendered one, and any external stimulus would have been redundant.

  But now and then a kind of delirium seemed to take possession of them. The Room waxed feverish with images reflected in distorting mirrors. Then a dark shadow fell across her; she would ask herself if this mysterious elixir they imbibed was none the less as noxious, habit-forming, as likely as any other drug to lead to the gas oven. Then some shift of ballast, some steadying of the keel would come to reassure her and dispel her doubts.

  But she had divined the truth, the workings in them of the wondrous substance. The drug was in their bloodstream.

  The cycles of drug-addiction proceed by gradual stages, each period producing its characteristic phenomena and transformations. The frontiers are not marked, but along each one of them stretches a no-man’s land of havoc and disturbance. The area of vision breaks up kaleidoscopically, to form fresh patterns.

  Less and less did the Game predominate in Elisabeth’s new life, and even in that of Paul. As for Gérard, he was completely absorbed in Elisabeth and had given it up. Every attempt made by Paul and Elisabeth to resuscitate it ended dismally and merely made them irritable. They could not longer be gone. The dream wavered, its thread thinned out, dissolved. The truth was, they were gone elsewhere. Past masters in escaping from themselves, they accepted the new force which drove them inwards, but took it for distraction. Where formerly they had swung airily above the tragic stage, like gods and goddesses on wires at a command performance, they were now immersed in the dramatic plot itself. Their own performances left much to be desired. To look within requires self-discipline, and this they lacked. Primeval darkness, ghosts of feeling, were all that they encountered. “Damn! damn!” cried Paul, exasperated. They all looked up. “Damn!” meant that, to his furious annoyance, some floating wraith of Agatha had cut across his preparations for departure to the land of shades: the cause of the disaster was too plain for Paul, self-engrossed, or for his sister, watching him, to recognize it. He insisted that the fault was Agatha’s and made her bear the brunt of his ill-temper. As for Elisabeth, who also was endeavoring to put out to sea, only to founder on hitherto uncharted reefs, she snatched the opportunity to turn her observation outwards. She misinterpreted Paul’s spitefulness, thinking: “He’s fed up with Agatha because she reminds him of Dargelos,” and failing to discern the passion that provoked it. Thus once again, between these two antagonists—as inexpert in self-analysis as they had once been learned in the lore of the unknowable—the bitter duel was on, with Agatha for gage.

  But brawling leads to laryngitis. The wordy battles petered out, then ceased, and once again the warriors found harsh reality impinging on their dream, disturbing childhood’s vegetative existence and scattering all its harmless toys.

  What cryptic impulse of self-preservation, what psychic nerve had momentarily stayed Elisabeth’s hand, that day of adding Dargelos to the treasure? No doubt her senses had vibrated to the complex instincts Paul was trying to suppress, to the self-conscious, unconvincing tone of voice he had assumed to ask her: “Shall we keep it?” Be that as it may, this much was certain: the photograph of Dargelos was no idle toy. His suggestion had been flung out with the jaunty disingenuousness of one caught red-handed. She had complied with patent lack of zest, and left the room with knowing and ironic shrugs at Paul and Gérard, just to be on the safe side, just to keep them guessing—just to impress on them that whatever their little game might be, she was already on to it.

  Stealthily, insidiously, it would appear, the silence of the drawer had wrought upon the picture, to bring about the sinister merging of two separate images. That Agatha, holding up the photograph, had brandished not Dargelos but his snowball, was scarcely a matter for surprise.

  PART II

  FOR SEVERAL days the Room had been running into heavy weather. Elisabeth had persistently tormented Paul by enigmatic looks and cryptic references to a “delicious something,” which he would not be allowed to share. She treated Agatha as her confidante, Gérard as her accomplice, and countered any direct approach to the forbidden subject with a great display of winks. These machinations succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. Paul writhed and twisted on the rack of curiosity, pride alone preventing him from trying to pump Agatha or Gérard, who, under pain of terrible reprisals, were sworn to silence. At length curiosity prevailed. Posting himself at what Elisabeth had nicknamed the “stage door,” he spied on the conspirators and discovered that not only Gérard but a dashing young man in a sports car was waiting for them.

  The scene that occurred that night was cataclysmic. The girls were prostitutes, foul prostitutes, and Gérard was a pimp. He himself would leave the house. Then they could use it as a brothel. It was only to be expected. All mannequins were tarts, low ones at that. His sister was a bitch in heat, she had corrupted Agatha, and Gérard was behind it all.

  Agatha wept. Gérard lost his temper, and in spite of Elisabeth’s mild and repeated interjections of: “Leave him alone, Gérard, he’s absurd,” insisted on explaining that the young man was a friend of his uncle’s, was called Michael, was an American Jew, was enormously rich, and that in any case they had been on the point of coming clean and introducing him to Paul.

  Never, shrieked Paul, would he consent to meet the “filthy Jew”: he was coming along tomorrow at the appointed hour to slap his face.

  “It’s too squalid,” he concluded, his eyes glittering. “You take an inexperienced young girl along with you, simply to sell her to a Jew. I suppose you’re hoping for a rake-off.”

 
; “Rubbish, my dear fellow,” retorted Elisabeth. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, I do assure you. I’m the one Michael’s got his eye on. He wants to marry me, and what’s more I like him very much.”

  “Marry you? Marry you? You must be mad. Have you looked in the glass lately? Don’t you realize you’re a monster? Do you really think anyone would want to marry you, you prize idiot? He must be pulling your leg.”

  And he burst into hysterical laughter.

  Elisabeth was well aware that it was a matter of complete indifference to Paul, as to herself, whether people were or were not Jewish. She felt suffused with warmth and well-being. Her heart so overflowed it could have cracked the walls. How she reveled in this pseudo-laughter! How grim his jaw looked now! What sport indeed to goad him to such frenzy!

  Next morning, Paul felt that he had made a fool of himself. His outburst, he secretly admitted, had been unnecessarily extravagant. Quite forgetting that he had suspected the American of designs on Agatha, he now told himself that Elisabeth was her own mistress, that he couldn’t care less whom she chose to marry. He wondered why on earth he had flown off the handle.

  After a period of sulks, he finally let himself be persuaded to meet Michael.

  Michael was in every way the Room’s antithesis. This was so evident that no attempt was ever made to introduce him to it. He personified the outside world. One saw at a glance that he was of the world worldly, that his whole treasure was laid up on earth, and as for ecstasy, his only chance of it would come when driving at a hundred miles an hour, at the wheel of the latest thing in high-powered sports cars.

  His film-star personality captured Paul who promptly set aside his principles and fell for him. Drunk with speed, they went whirling through the countryside at all hours other than those tacitly consecrated by the four initiates to the ceremonies of the Room; and by Michael, in all simplicity, to sleep.

  Their midnight mysteries took nothing from the stature of the absent Michael. He was invoked, worshipped, completely re-created.

  How could he know, when next they met, that magic juices were laid upon their eyelids, making them madly dote upon him, after the manner of Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

  “Why shouldn’t I marry Michael?”

  “Why shouldn’t Elisabeth marry Michael?”

  In the future their separate rooms would be assured. They lost their heads and sketched wild plans for rooms-to-be—domestic projects as ambitious and grotesque as those confided to reporters by the celebrated Siamese twins.

  Gérard alone lacked stomach for the game. He silently withdrew. Never would he have aspired to marry the Pythoness, the Sacred Virgin. It took a melodramatic film type, an ignorant young racing driver, to desecrate the inner shrine and carry off its inmate.

  And the Room went on, and the wedding preparations were afoot, and still the hair’s-breadth balance was maintained: the clown’s act, in the interval, the sickening, ever-mounting pile of chairs, the clown ascending, step by giddy step.

  Nausea, giddiness, satiety of spirit now, sharper to the palate than the old physical satiety of childhood’s barley-sugar orgies—a glutton’s diet of sensation, a cloying hotchpotch of misrule, disorder.

  But Michael had no notion of these things. He would have been astonished to discover that he had picked a vestal virgin for his chosen bride. He was in love with a ravishing young girl and wished to marry her. Lightheartedly he brought her his splendid house in Paris, his cars, his fortune, and laid them at her feet.

  For her own room Elisabeth settled on a Louis XVI period décor, leaving Michael as sole tenant of the reception rooms, the music room, gymnasium, and swimming pool, besides an absurd sort of Town Hall of a room, with windows level with the tree-tops, that did duty for dining-room, billiard-room and fencing-gallery. Agatha was to live with them. Elisabeth had set aside a little suite of rooms for her, just above her own.

  Agatha shed bitter tears in secret, seeing the contemplated break-up of the Room as a personal disaster. What would become of her without its potent magic, without the nights? Without Paul constantly beside her? The miracle depended on the alternating current between the brother and the sister. Yet neither of them seemed to be affected by this total shipwreck, this earthquake, this Apocalypse.

  They simply acted, no more worried by the thought of consequences, direct or indirect, than a dramatic masterpiece is concerned with the successive stages of the plot that go to make its climax. Gérard was all self-sacrifice. Agatha bowed submissively to Paul’s good pleasure.

  “It’ll suit us all down to the ground,” said Paul. “Whenever Gérard’s uncle goes away, Gérard can use Agatha’s room.” (They no longer called it Mummy’s room.) “And supposing Michael went abroad or something, the girls can simply move back here.”

  The way he spoke of them as “the girls” showed clearly with what a daydream eye he viewed this marriage, and how tenuous his grasp was on the future.

  Michael tried to persuade Paul to come and live with them, but he had determined on a solitary existence and declined. So Michael undertook entire financial responsibility for the rue Montmartre household, with Mariette for steward.

  The wedding ceremony was brief, witnessed by a couple of the trustees appointed to administer the bridegroom’s unimaginable fortune. No sooner was it over than Michael, thinking to give Elisabeth and Agatha a chance to settle in, jumped into his racing car en route for a week in Eze, to see the architect who was building them a villa. Domestic life would start when he came back.

  But the genius of the Room was vigilant.

  Need it be told in words? On the road between Cannes and Nice, Michael met his death.

  It was one of those cars with a low chassis. The wind caught his long scarf, wrapped it round the wheel, and in one savage second strangled him. The car skidded, buckled, reared against a tree, and was nothing but a heap of wreckage with one wheel spinning like a roulette wheel … slower, slower, slower in the silence.

  ELISABETH felt quite incapable of coping with all the wearisome legal paraphernalia of her widowhood: all she was to know of marriage was a series of meetings with solicitors, documents to be signed, and widow’s weeds. Though freed from financial responsibility, the doctor and Gérard’s uncle now found their burden even heavier and more thankless than before. Elisabeth had no compunction in letting everything devolve on them.

  They spent all their time with the executors, sorting papers and totting up columns of figures representing sums of incalculable magnitude.

  Mention has been made already of the inherent richness of Elisabeth and Paul—a richness so entire, so absolute, that nothing in the way of further worldly wealth could possibly accrue to them. Now that they had inherited a fortune, this was self-evident. What did affect them was the dramatic impact of the accident. They had been fond of Michael. Now, by virtue of his strange nuptials and astounding death, this youth without a secret was translated into the most secret places. The scarf that sprang to stop his mortal breath had touched the door and flung him, dead, into the Room.

  WITH AGATHA’S departure, Paul lost all relish for domestic solitude. The thought of living alone had made some sense in the old days, when he and his sister had wrestled over bags of candy and squabbled greedily; not now, when the years had given him desires more difficult to compass.

  He did not know precisely what it was he lacked; but the taste of solitude, once coveted, was ashes on his tongue. Persuaded by Elisabeth, he took advantage of this state of negativity to change his mind and set up house with her.

  She gave him Michael’s room, divided from her own by an enormous bathroom. The colored staff of four, including the chef, gave notice and went back to America. Mariette replaced them by a woman from her native Brittany. The chauffeur stayed on.

  No sooner was Paul settled in than they began to gravitate towards a dormitory.

  Agatha felt frightened, all alone on the floor above…. Paul couldn’t sleep in his four-poster…. Gérard�
�s uncle had gone to Germany to inspect some factories…. In no time, Agatha had moved downstairs to share Elisabeth’s bed, while Paul dragged his bedding over to the couch and made himself a burrow, and Gérard wrapped himself in a cocoon of shawls.

  It was here, in this abstraction, this Room fortuitously assembled or dispersed, that Michael had come to dwell since the disaster. O Sacred Virgin! … Gérard had guessed truly. Never would Elisabeth be his, Michael’s, or any man’s in the whole world. Love made him clairvoyant, and he beheld the impenetrable circle that severed her from human love, that none might violate, save at the price of life itself. And even could the virgin have been ravished by the living Michael, only by his death could he have won possession of the temple.

  THE READER will remember that one of the features of the mansion was a gallery, which more or less did duty for study, dining-room and billiard-room. Architecturally considered, it was a technical anomaly, for it served no conceivable purpose and led nowhere. A strip of stair-carpeting had been laid down over the linoleum from end to end of one side of the room. On the other side, beneath a cheap electric light fixture suspended from the ceiling, stood a dining-room table, a few chairs and a number of plywood screens. The screens partitioned off the so-called dining-room from the so-called study, where a sofa, one or two leather armchairs, a revolving bookcase, and a globe were disposed haphazard round another table—an architect’s trestle table—furnished with a reading lamp that cast the only focal beam of light in the whole room.

  Beyond this, despite a rocking-chair or two, all seemed immensities of vacant space; then came the billiard-table, monumental in its isolation. Here and there, tall windows cast watchful slats of light upon the ceiling and bathed the décor in an unreal lunar radiance.