The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  She walked all round them, pushed aside a panel in the screens, and found Paul sitting on the floor, his head and shoulders flung back against a pile of rugs. He was weeping. His tears were not like Agatha’s; neither were they the tears he had shed once for ruined friendship. One after another they formed between his eyelids, swelled, brimmed over, trickled down his cheeks, collected near the corner of his lip, then fell again, slowly, drop after heavy drop.

  The impact of his letter should have been violent. The letter could not have failed to reach Agatha. This vacuum, this suspense, was killing him; he could no longer bear the strain of self-control and silence. At all costs he must know, must be delivered from uncertainty. Elisabeth must be questioned; she had this moment come from Agatha.

  “What letter?”

  Had she not been forewarned, Elisabeth would doubtless have become provocative. In the ensuing battle she might well have shown herself in her true colors; and Paul might well have held his tongue. But instead of a litigious adversary, he found himself before a judge—a merciful judge—and he confessed. He poured out everything—his change of heart, his inability to deal with it, his letter written as a last resort—and begged Elisabeth to tell him whether or no Agatha was likely to reject his suit.

  These successive depth-charges served only to set her automatically functioning upon another track. She was appalled to hear of the special delivery letter. Suppose Agatha already had this trump card up her sleeve…. Suppose she had been playing it…. Or had she put it aside unopened, then suddenly recognized the handwriting, and torn it open? Was she opening it now, this very instant? Was she already on her way to Paul?

  “Just a moment, my pet,” she said. “Wait, I’ve got some important things to tell you. Agatha never said a word about your special delivery letter. It can’t have flown away. It’s simply got to be found. I’m just going upstairs. I’ll be back in no time.”

  She hurried away. Suddenly it struck her that the letter might still be in the hall; considered in retrospect, Agatha’s despair seemed certainly authentic. No one had gone out. Gérard never bothered to look at the letters. If it had been left downstairs, it might still be there.

  It was still there. The crumpled, dog-eared yellow envelope lay like a dead leaf on the salver.

  She switched on the light. It was Paul’s handwriting, a clumsy schoolboy scrawl, and the name on the envelope his own. Paul had written to himself! She tore it open.

  This was a house devoid of writing paper; any odd scrap was used for scribbling messages. Paul had torn a page from an exercise book to write on. She unfolded it, and read:

  Agatha, don’t be angry. I love you. I was a fool. I thought you were my enemy. I’ve found out now that I love you and that if you don’t love me, I shall die. 1 am on my knees, begging for an answer. I’m in agony. I shan’t stir from the gallery.

  Elisabeth shrugged her shoulders, grimaced contemptuously. Dashing down his own address, Paul, in his desperation, had mechanically prefixed it with his name as well. It was typical of him. He would never change.

  Supposing this letter had come hurtling back to him like a boomerang, instead of lying impotent upon the table in the hall? He would have lost heart, lost hope, and, utterly humiliated by his own absent-mindedness, destroyed it. She would spare him that.

  She retired to the lavatory in the gentlemen’s cloakroom, tore the letter into fragments, and pulled the plug on them.

  Forthwith returning to her luckless brother, she told him that she had found Agatha fast asleep, adding that there was a special delivery letter on the bedside table; she had seen it, a yellow envelope with a sheet of ruled paper sticking out of it. She had recognized it because it was obviously one from the copybook on Paul’s table.

  “Didn’t she even mention it when she was talking to you?”

  “No, and I’d rather she never knew I’d seen it. And we must be particularly careful not to seem to be inquiring after it. She’d be sure to say she doesn’t know what we’re talking about.”

  Paul had never managed to envisage the actual consequences of his letter. Wishful thinking had inclined him towards optimism. What he had never expected was this abyss, this void. The tears streamed down his rigid face.

  Elisabeth was prodigal of words of consolation, interspersing them with a minute account of a recent tête-à-tête with Agatha. The darling girl had broken down and told her all—how she loved Gérard, how he loved her back, how they intended to be married.

  “It’s odd,” she persisted, “that Gérard hasn’t said anything to you. I know he’s afraid of me; I seem to scare him stiff. But it’s different with you. I suppose he thought you wouldn’t take it seriously.”

  Paul was dumb, drinking this inconceivable and bitter cup. Elisabeth continued to elaborate her theme. Paul must be mad! Agatha was a simple girl and Gérard was such a nice boy. They were made for one another. Gérard’s uncle was getting old; Gérard would come into money; he would be free to marry Agatha and found a respectable bourgeois family. There seemed no impediment to their happiness. It would be monstrous, criminal, yes, criminal to throw a monkey wrench, to cause trouble, to upset Agatha, to shatter Gérard, to poison both their futures. Paul could not, must not, do it. It had been nothing but a passing fancy. When he thought it over, he would see for himself that a frivolous fancy such as his must yield to genuine and reciprocated love.

  For a whole hour she went on talking, talking, delivering a lecture on his bounden duty. She felt herself inspired, launched on the flood of her own oratory. She sobbed. Paul bowed his head submissively, placed himself without reservation in her hands. He promised to hold his tongue and try to look cheerful when the young couple broke their news to him. It was clear from Agatha’s silence that she had decided to forget about the letter, to make light of it, to forgive him. There might, of course, be a little awkwardness between them now: if Gérard noticed, it would never do. But he and Agatha would have the wedding to look forward to—that would tide them over. In no time they would be off on their honeymoon, and bygones would definitely be bygones.

  Elisabeth dried Paul’s tears, kissed him, tucked him in, and left him in his fortress. There was work to be done. The killer’s instinct told her to strike blow on blow and never stop to think. Night-spinning spider, dexterous, deliberate, she went on her way, drawing her thread relentlessly behind her, hanging it to the four corners of the night.

  She went to her own room, where she found Gérard expectantly hovering about.

  “What’s the news?” he asked eagerly.

  She quelled him with a glance.

  “How often have I told you not to yell? It’s one of your worst habits. Well, the news is that Paul’s ill. He hasn’t got the sense to realize it. I know by his eyes, by his tongue. He’s got a temperature. It’s for the doctor to say whether it’s a relapse or just a bout of flu. Meanwhile, I’ve taken it upon myself to keep him in bed and not allow him any visitors. You can have the bed in his old room.”

  “No. I’d better be off.”

  “Don’t go. I want to talk to you.”

  Her voice was ominous.

  Bidding him be seated, she paced up and down in front of him and presently inquired what he proposed to do about Agatha.

  “Do what? Why?” he asked.

  “What do you mean by ‘why’?” And in harsh, cutting tones she told him he was not going to get away with it—he knew perfectly well that Agatha was in love with him, was expecting him to propose, and couldn’t understand what he was playing at.

  Gérard’s jaw dropped. He stared at her dumbfounded.

  “Agatha….” he stammered. “Agatha….”

  “Yes, Agatha!” she blazed at him.

  He really was a half-wit. His outings with Agatha should have given him a clue. And gradually she built up a picture of Agatha, not as a sisterly companion, but as a would-be wife, filling out the canvas with a wealth of dates and proofs, until Gérard was shaken to the core. She went on to say that
Agatha was in great distress; she had got it into her head that Gérard was in love with her, Elisabeth, which was ridiculous, and anyway out of the question in view of her superior financial status.

  Gérard longed for the ground to open and swallow him up. It cut him to the quick to hear her thus degrade herself—and him—with this uncharacteristic, this vulgar talk of money. She saw her advantage, seized it, and dealt him blow on mortal blow, forbade him any more to pine for her, ordered him to marry Agatha and never to divulge her rôle of go-between. She had been forced into it by his obtuseness; and Agatha must never feel herself beholden to her for her married happiness—not for the whole world would she, Elisabeth, have that.

  “Well, now,” she concluded, “we’ve made a big step forward. Now go to bed. I’ll just run up to Agatha and break it gently to her. You are in love with her. You’ve been living in a dream world. Your dreams carried you above your station. Wake up. Think how lucky you are. Give me a kiss and let me hear you say you’re the happiest man alive.”

  Too stunned by now to offer any further resistance, Gérard bleated out some vague affirmation. She conducted him to Paul’s room and shut the door on him; then, sleepless Arachne, she climbed the stairs to Agatha.

  MURDERERS have been known to find that young girls give them more trouble than anybody else.

  Though Agatha reeled beneath the blows, she would not break. In the end, however, after a desperate battle, in the course of which Elisabeth went on insisting that Paul was incapable of love; that he did not love her because he could love no one; that, self-destructive, monstrously selfish as he was, he could not fail to destroy any woman who surrendered to him; that Gérard, on the other hand, was that rare being, a man devoted and reliable enough to guarantee a woman’s future happiness; in the end, the poor girl collapsed, worn out, and relinquished the last vestige of her dream. Prostrate beneath Elisabeth’s scrutiny, she lay inert, uncovered, her head flung back, her damp hair sticking to her forehead, one hand pressed to her heart as if to staunch its wound, the other dropped stone-dead upon the floor.

  Elisabeth raised her on her pillows, powdered her face, assured her that Paul was and would remain without an inkling of her feelings for him: all she had to do was to assume a cheerful face and tell him she was going to marry Gérard.

  “Thank you … thank you … you are kind….” she gasped brokenly, between her sobs.

  “Don’t thank me, go to sleep,” said Elisabeth; and she left the room.

  She paused for a second. She felt serene, detached, eased of a heavy burden. Just as she reached the stairs, her heart began to knock. She heard a footstep. A moment after, she saw Paul coming towards her.

  His long white bathrobe made him luminous. In a flash she realized that he was walking in his sleep, as he had often done, when under strain, in the old rue Montmartre days. She leaned against the banisters, one foot suspended, not daring to move a muscle, lest Paul should wake and question her. But he did not see her where she stood palpitating, poised for flight; his gaze was on the stairs. She could have been a woman cast in bronze, holding a lamp to light his upward progress. The thudding axe of her heart sounded so loud in her own ears, she thought with dread that he must hear it too.

  Paul stood still for a few moments, then turned away slowly and vanished into the silence. She stayed listening to his retreating steps, let fall her weight again on her numb foot and stole away.

  Back in her own room, she could hear nothing from next door. Was Gérard asleep? She stood long before the mirror in her bathroom. The image fascinated her. She bent her head; she washed her terrifying hands.

  FEELING his end approaching and anxious to see the young couple settled as soon as possible, Gérard’s uncle hurried on the wedding preparations. The characters played their allotted parts in an atmosphere of false cheerfulness and competitive generosity. Behind the buzz and hum of cozy ritual lay the mortal weight of the unspoken. The artificial merriment of Paul, Agatha and Gérard, weighed like lead upon Elisabeth’s heart. In vain she told herself that her vigilance had saved them all from shipwreck, that thanks to her Agatha would be preserved from Paul and all his waywardness, and Paul from Agatha’s mediocrity. In vain she rehearsed her inward monologue: Gérard and Agatha are two of a kind, they were bound to come together, we were nothing but the intermediary, a year from now there’ll be a baby, they’ll be blessing me. In vain she attempted to forget her role of arbiter during the night of wrath, casting it from her like a dream engendered by some cataleptic trance; in vain she depersonalized the whole affair, dismissed it as the workings of an all-seeing Providence; still she was troubled in the presence of the melancholy trio, yet dared not leave them for fear of the dire consequences.

  There was no one of them she did not trust. Could it ever have occurred to them to compare notes, they might have found reason to suspect her of malevolence, and forced her to a showdown; but they were too well-bred for that. Malevolent? But why? Why should she want to harm them? She was encouraged to find she could produce no answers. She loved them all, poor dears. They were her lifework, her vocation. She had gathered them beneath her wing, sheltered them, shouldered the entire burden of their follies, managed to avert the certain Nemesis that would have overtaken them. She had paid, must pay, in blood and tears. It had to be.

  She went on telling herself it had to be, in the manner of a surgeon staking his reputation on a crucial diagnosis. The dagger she had grasped became his scalpel. Confronted at a moment’s notice with an acute emergency, she had had no option but to give the anesthetic and perform the operation. Thanks to her skill, the patient was recovering. Then, at the sound of Agatha’s strained laughter, at the sight of Paul’s haggard face, of Gérard’s artificial grin, she would start awake, beset once more by doubts and terrors, flying from the rumor of the chase behind her, knowing the Furies hard upon her heels.

  The honeymoon left brother and sister alone together. Paul was pining visibly. Elisabeth moved in behind the barricades, sat up with him, nursed him day and night. The doctor was baffled by this mysterious relapse; but the whole illness had always been unorthodox. The bamboo hut dismayed him; he advised the removal of the patient to a comfortable room. Paul, permanently wrapped in a cocoon of shawls, refused to budge. A muffled light fell on the seated figure of Elisabeth, bowed forward, her chin propped in her hands, staring into space, careworn, consumed with somber thoughts. As Gérard, once, seeing the face of Paul flushed by the glory of the fire-engines, had fancied him reviving, so now she saw it bloom in the reflection from the scarlet bunting; and since false hopes were now her only diet, told herself it was, must be the ruddy glow of health.

  The death of Gérard’s uncle brought the young couple hurrying home. Elisabeth placed an entire floor of the mansion at their disposal; but despite her insistence they declined the offer, and took up residence in the rue Lafitte. This seemed to her to augur favorably for their future; they were clearly settling down contentedly to humdrum domesticity (the most they were entitled to) and had decided to shun their friend’s unruly sphere of influence. When he heard of their decision, Paul breathed again. He had dreaded a resumption of their former intimacy.

  “We’re going to be dropped,” declared Elisabeth. “We’re thoroughly undesirable. Gérard made no bones about it. He says we’re bad for Agatha. Yes, honestly! You wouldn’t recognize him. He’s turned into his uncle. I was absolutely staggered. At first I thought he had his tongue in his cheek. I thought he must be trying to get a rise out of me.”

  From time to time they came to the house for lunch or dinner. Paul would leave his bed for the occasion and join the others in the dining-room. The meal would be swallowed to the accompaniment of brittle chatter, under the watchful eye of Mariette—the melancholy eye of a shrewd Breton, a peasant’s eye for the shape of grief to come.

  ONE DAY, just as they were sitting down to lunch, Gérard said lightly:

  “Guess who I ran into?”

  Paul replied with an in
quiring shrug.

  “Dargelos!”

  “Not really?”

  “Yes, really, my dear fellow.”

  He went on to say that he had been almost run over by a small car when he was crossing the street. The car stopped: Dargelos was driving it. He had already heard that Gérard had inherited his uncle’s property and was managing the factories. He was anxious to be shown over one. He obviously had an eye to the main chance.

  Paul wanted to know if he had changed.

  Pretty much the same, a bit less color than he used to have…. Extraordinarily like Agatha—might be taken for her brother. And quite the opposite of high-hat these days. Very, very friendly, in fact. He was an agent for a motor firm and spent his time traveling between France and Indo-China. He had taken Gérard back to his hotel and asked him if he saw anything of Snowball … that snowball fellow…. He meant Paul.

  “So what?”

  “I told him I saw you constantly. Then he said: ‘Does he still like poison?’”

  Agatha gave a start.

  “Poison?” she cried, thunderstruck.

  “You bet.” Paul’s voice was loud, aggressive. “Glorious stuff, poison! I was always dying to get hold of some when I was at school.” (It would have been more accurate to say that Dargelos was obsessed by poisons and that he, Paul, had copied Dargelos.)

  “What could be the point?” asked Agatha.

  “No point at all,” said Paul. “Because I wanted it, I wanted to have some poison. It’s glorious. I’d like to have it in the same way as I’d like to have a basilisk or a mandrake, in the same way that I like having a revolver. You’ve got it, you know you’ve got it, it’s there for you to look at. It’s poison. Glorious!”

  Elisabeth agreed. It was an opportunity to snub Agatha and to demonstrate her old solidarity with the magic of the Room. She declared that she adored poison. In the days of the rue Montmartre, she used to play at brewing poisons, bottling and sealing them, sticking gruesome labels on them, making up sinister names.