The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  “How ghastly! Gérard, they’re mad! I know they’ll end in the jug.”

  Elisabeth was delighted by Agatha’s outburst; by corroborating the bourgeois status she had conferred on the young couple, it absolved her of deliberate bad faith towards them. She caught Paul’s eye and winked.

  “Dargelos showed me his whole collection,” went on Gérard. “Poisons from India, China, Mexico, the West Indies, poisons for arrow-tips, poisons for lingering death by torture, vendetta poisons, poisons for sacrificial rites. He said jokingly: ‘Tell Snowball I haven’t changed. I always wanted to collect poisons. Now I do so. Here, give him this to play with.’”

  Under the goggling eyes of Elisabeth and Paul, Gérard felt in his pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Agatha turned her back on the proceedings.

  They opened the parcel, and found inside it a lump of something round and dark, about the size of a fist, contained in a flimsy paper sheath. It was the color of earth, and had a texture not unlike a truffle, apart from one raw reddish gash in it. It gave off an odor as of clay newly dug; also a pungent whiff of onion and of oil of geranium.

  Nobody spoke. They stood frozen before this object that drew and yet repelled them, as if a uniform reptilian mass should suddenly uncoil before their eyes and rear a dozen snaky heads. It was death’s absolute presence that confronted them.

  “It’s a drug,” said Paul. “He must be a drug-addict. He wouldn’t make so free with it if it was poison.”

  He put a hand out.

  “Don’t touch it!” Gérard pushed the hand away. “Whatever it is, it’s a present from Dargelos, but he said you weren’t on any account to touch it. But I wouldn’t dream of letting you keep the horrible thing—you’re much too casual.”

  Paul lost his temper. Taking his cue from Elisabeth, he told Gérard not to be so stuffy. Who did he think he was? His dear departed uncle, etc.?

  “Casual, are we?” sneered Elisabeth. “Just you wait!”

  Snatching up the parcel, she started to chase her brother round and round the table, shouting:

  “Go on, eat it, eat it!”

  Agatha fled; Paul leapt on a table, buried his face in his hands. She panted after him, jeering:

  “There’s a brave boy! See how casual he is!”

  “Eat it yourself, you fool,” retorted Paul.

  “And die of it, I suppose. Suit you fine, wouldn’t it? No, thanks, I propose to deposit our poison in the treasure.”

  “The smell’s absolutely overpowering,” said Gérard. “You ought to put it in a tin.”

  Elisabeth wrapped it up, shoved it into an empty biscuit tin, and vanished from the room. The top of the treasure chest was littered with their various possessions—revolver, books, the whiskered plaster bust; she opened a drawer and placed the tin on top of Dargelos. Carefully, with infinite precautions, she set it down, with a schoolgirl’s grimace of concentration; with something of the air, the gestures of a woman pricking a wax image, aiming precisely, then ramming home the pin.

  Paul saw himself back at school again, aping Dargelos, obsessed with violence and barbaric rites, dreaming of poisoned arrows, hoping to impress his hero by an invention of his own, namely, a project for mass-murder by means of poisoned gum affixed to postage stamps. And all in wantonness, without a thought of poison’s lethal implications, all to curry favor with a lout…. Dargelos would shrug and turn away, scornful as of a silly girl.

  Dargelos had not forgotten the abject slave who once hung on his lips: this gift of poison was the crowning stroke of his derision.

  Its hidden promise filled the brother and sister with a strange elation. The room had become richer by an extra, an incalculable dimension. It had acquired the potentials of an anarchist conspiracy; as if a charge of human dynamite had been sunk in it, would be touched off at the appointed hour, explode in blood sublimely, stream in the incandescent firmament of love.

  Moreover, Paul was reveling in this parade of eccentricity from which Gérard, according to Elisabeth, wished to protect Agatha; it was a smack at Gérard, and also at his wife.

  Elisabeth, for her part, was triumphant. She saw the old Paul back upon the war path, trampling down convention, grasping the nettle danger, jealous as ever of the sacred treasure.

  She invested the poison with symbolic properties: it was the antidote to pettiness and parochialism; would, must—surely—lead to the final overthrow of Agatha.

  But Paul failed to respond to cure by witchcraft. His appetite did not improve; listless, apathetic, he went on pining, wasting, sinking by slow stages into a decline.

  SUNDAY was a regular day off for the whole household, according to the Anglo-Saxon custom adopted during Michael’s lifetime. Mariette filled the thermos flasks, cut sandwiches, then went out with the housemaid. The chauffeur, whose duties included lending a hand indoors with the cleaning, borrowed one of the cars and spent his time profitably, picking up casual passengers for hire.

  On this particular Sunday it was snowing. Acting on instructions from the doctor, Elisabeth had gone to her own room to lie down and had drawn the curtains. It was five o’clock. Paul had been dozing since noon. He had insisted on her leaving him alone, had begged her to listen to the doctor. She was asleep, and dreaming. She dreamed that Paul was dead. She was walking through a forest, but at the same time it was the gallery; she recognized it by the light falling between the tree-trunks from tall windows set in dark intermittent panels of opacity. She came to a furnished clearing and saw the billiard-table, some chairs, one or two other tables. She thought: I must get to the mound. In her dream she knew that the word mound meant the billiard-table. Striding, sometimes skimming just above the ground, she made haste to reach it, but she could not. She lay down exhausted and fell asleep. Suddenly Paul roused her. She cried:

  “Paul, oh Paul! So you’re not dead?”

  And Paul replied: “Yes, I am dead, but so are you. You’ve just died. That’s why you can see me. You’re going to live with me for ever and ever.”

  They went on walking. After a long time they reached the mound.

  “Listen,” said Paul, putting a finger on the automatic marker. “Listen to the parting knell.” The marker began to whirr dementedly. The glade began to hum—louder, louder, a noise like buzzing telegraph wires….

  She woke aghast, to find herself sitting bolt upright, drenched in perspiration. A bell was pealing. She remembered that the servants were all out. Still in the grip of nightmare, she ran downstairs and opened the front door. On a white whirlwind Agatha blew in, disheveled, crying out: “Where’s Paul?”

  By now Elisabeth had come round, was shaking off the dream’s last clinging threads.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “What’s the matter with you? Paul’s asleep as usual, I suppose. He said he didn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Quick, quick,” gasped Agatha, “run, we must hurry. I had a letter, he said by the time I got it it would be too late, the poison, he’d have taken the poison, he said he was going to shut you out of his room and take it.” She clutched Elisabeth, pushing, pulling, trying to urge her forward. Mariette had left a note at the young couple’s flat at four o’clock.

  Elisabeth stood stock still. It was the dream, she told herself, she must be still asleep. She was turned to stone. Then she was running. She and this other girl were running, running.

  Now she had reached the gallery, but in the dream still, she was in a spectral glade of roaring wind and darkness, of trees whipped white in the interlucent spaces; and there, in the distance, still the mound, the billiard-table, the real and nightmare relic of an earthquake.

  “Paul! Paul! Speak to us! Paul!”

  There was no answer. The shining precincts gave back, for all reply, a charnel breath. They broke in, and the full impact of the disaster hit them simultaneously. The room was thick with an ominous aroma: they knew it—reddish, black, a compound of truffles, onions, essence of geranium, overpowering, beginning a
lready to invade the gallery. His eyeballs starting from their sockets, his face distorted beyond recognition, Paul lay supine, wearing a bathrobe exactly like his sister’s. Lamplight, snow-blurred, eddying down through the high windows, threw gusts of shifting shadow across the livid mask, touched nose and cheekbones into faint relief. Beside him on the chair, jostling one another, lay the remainder of the poison, a water-bottle and the photograph of Dargelos.

  The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them. What the girls found impossible, at first, was to suspend their natural disbelief. They had to admit, to accept the inadmissible, to recognize this unknown shape as Paul.

  Rushing forward, Agatha flung herself on her knees beside him, brought her face close to his, discovered that he was breathing. A flicker of hope leapt up in her.

  “Lise,” she urged, “don’t stand there doing nothing, go and get dressed, he may be only doped, this frightful thing may not be deadly poison. Get a thermos bottle, run and fetch the doctor.”

  “The doctor’s away, he’s shooting this weekend,” stammered the wretched girl. “There’s nobody … there’s nobody….”

  “Quick, quick, get a thermos! He’s breathing, he’s icy cold. He must have a hot water bottle, we must get some hot coffee down his throat.”

  Agatha’s presence of mind amazed Elisabeth. How could she bring herself to speak, touch Paul, how could she so bestir herself? How did she know he needed a hot water bottle? What made her think she could prevail by commonsense against the implacable decrees of snow and death?

  Abruptly she pulled herself together, remembered that the thermos bottles were in her bedroom. She flew to get them, calling over her shoulder:

  “Cover him up!”

  Paul was still breathing. Since swallowing what Dargelos had sent him, he had endured four hours of sensations so phenomenal that he had wondered intermittently whether the stuff was after all a drug, not poison, and if so, whether he had taken a sufficient dose to kill him; but now the worst of the ordeal was over. His limbs had ceased to exist. He was floating in space, had almost recaptured his old sense of well-being. But his saliva had entirely ceased to flow, and consequently his dry tongue rasped his throat like sandpaper; except where all feeling had become extinct, his parched skin crawled unbearably. He had attempted to drink. He had put a faltering hand out, groping in vain to find the water bottle. But now his legs and arms were all but paralyzed; and he had ceased to move.

  Whenever he closed his eyes, the same images reappeared: the head of a giant ram with a woman’s long gray locks; some dead and blinded soldiers marching in stiff military procession, slowly, then faster, faster, round and round a grove; he saw that their feet were tethered to the branches. The bedsprings shook and twanged beneath him to the wild knocking of his heart. The veins swelled, stiffened in his arms, the bark grew round them, his arms became the branches of a tree. The soldiers circled round his arms; and the whole thing began again.

  He sank into a swoon, was back in the time of snow, the old days of the Game, was in the cab with Gérard, driving home. He heard Agatha sobbing:

  “Paul! Paul! Open your eyes, speak to me….”

  His mouth felt clogged with sourness. His gummed-up, flaccid lips framed one word only: “Drink….”

  “Try to be patient…. Elisabeth has gone to get the thermos. She’s bringing a hot water bottle.”

  “Drink…” he said again.

  Agatha moistened his lips with water. She took his letter from her handbag, showed it to him, begged him to try and tell her what madness had come over him.

  “It’s your fault, Agatha.”

  “My fault?”

  Syllable by syllable, he started to whisper, stammer out the truth. She interrupted him with protestations, exclamations. The man-trap was exposed in all its tortuous ingenuity. Together the dying man and the young woman touched it and turned it over, unscrewed the diabolical contrivance piece by piece. Their words engendered a stubborn, treacherous, criminal Elisabeth, whose machinations of that night were plain at last.

  “You mustn’t die!” cried Agatha.

  “Too late,” he mourned.

  At that moment, Elisabeth, fearful of leaving them too long alone together, came hurrying back with the thermos and the hot water bottle. There was a moment of unearthly silence, then nothing but the pervasive smell of death again. Elisabeth had her back turned; she was busy hunting among boxes and bottles, looking for a tumbler, filling it with coffee, not yet aware that all had been discovered. She advanced towards her victims, saw they were watching her, stopped dead. By a savage and supreme effort, with Agatha’s arms round him, her cheek against his cheek, Paul had half-raised himself among the pillows. Deadly hatred blazed from both their faces. She held the coffee out towards him, but a cry from Agatha arrested her:

  “Paul, don’t touch it!”

  “You’re mad,” she muttered, “I’m not trying to poison him.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  This was more than death; it was the heart’s death. Elisabeth swayed on her feet. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

  “Devil! Filthy devil!”

  His words confirmed the worst of her suspicions and crushed her with an extra weight of horror: she had not dreamed he had the strength to speak.

  “Filthy, filthy devil!”

  Over and over again, with his dying breath, he spat it at her, raking her with his blue gaze, with a last long volley of fire from the blue slits between his eyelids. His lips, that had been so beautiful, twisted and twitched spasmodically; from the dried well of what had been his heart rose nothing but a tearless glitter, a wolfish phosphorescence.

  The blizzard went on battering at the windows. Elisabeth flinched, then said:

  “Yes, you’re right, it’s true. I was jealous. I didn’t want to lose you. I loathe Agatha. I wasn’t going to let her take you away.”

  Stripped, her disguise thrown off at last, she took the truth for garment; she grew in stature. As if blown by a storm, her locks streamed back and her small fierce brow loomed monumental, abstract, above the lucent eyes. She stood fast by the Room; she stood against them all, defying Agatha, Gérard, Paul, and the whole world.

  She snatched up the revolver from the chest of drawers.

  “She’s going to shoot! She’s going to kill me!” screamed Agatha. She clung to Paul, but he had left her side, was wandering.

  Elisabeth had no thoughts of making Agatha her target. She had seized the revolver, not to shoot down this elegant flesh-and-blood young woman, but with the last gesture of the spy unmasked, her back against the wall, her supreme instinct a determination to sell her life as dearly as she could.

  But the gesture was lost on such an audience. What could it avail to put on greatness for a dying man and a hysterical young woman?

  So this is what Agatha saw suddenly: a maniac in the act of disintegrating before her very eyes, standing before the mirror, grimacing, drooling, squinting, tearing her hair out by the roots. For Elisabeth had given up: no longer able to bear this slackening in the pace of Nemesis, she was trying to resolve her inner tension by letting herself collapse, was struggling by means of this grotesque mime of imbecility to reduce life to its ultimate absurdity, to push towards the frontiers of what might still have to be endured, to attain the moment when the drama would have done with her at last, would spew her forth.

  “She’s gone mad! Help! Help!” screamed Agatha.

  The word “mad” acted as a check upon Elisabeth; with an effort, she controlled herself. She would be calm now. She had two weapons—death and oblivion—in her trembling hands. With her head bowed, she stood erect.

  She knew that the Room was rushing headlong down a giddy slope towards its end; but the end was not yet and must be lived through: there must be no slackening of the tensi
on. Snatches of the multiplication table went whirling through her head, odds and ends of figures, dates, street numbers: she added them all together, divided them, made nonsense of them, started all over again. Suddenly she remembered the origin of the mound: “mound” was the word for “hill” in Paul et Virginie. Their island…. Where could it have been? The Ile de France? The names of islands began to float across her mind. lie de France, Mauritius, lie Saint Louis. She recited the names, transposed them, shuffled them, annulled them, created void at last, achieved the vortex.

  Paul felt the impact of her utter calm. He opened his eyes. She looked at him, encountered a remote yet dwelling gaze, emptied of hatred now, beginning to deepen secretly with curiosity. She saw, and felt a premonitory surge of triumph, knew that the knot that bound them still held fast. Fixing her eyes unswervingly on his, spinning out the thread of trance towards him, adding and subtracting automatically, making lists of names and places, slowly she spread the net around him, surely she drew him backward into nothingness, back into the Game, into their world of light and air, their Room.

  With the preternatural clairvoyance of fever, she penetrated into the most secret places. The shades obeyed her. What hitherto she had wrought mindlessly, building as bees build, no more aware of motive or direction than a patient in a deep hypnotic sleep, she now created and directed consciously. Like one who under sudden violent shock rises from long paralysis and walks; she moved, she took her bearings.

  She was drawing Paul, and Paul was following her: no doubt of it. Certainty was the rock on which she based her unimaginable mental structure. She piped, she piped, she charmed him; he swayed to her tune. Already, she knew it, he no longer felt Agatha clinging round his neck; he had already become deaf to her laments. How should Elisabeth or Paul have heard her? Her cries are pitched far below the key they have selected for their requiem. Now they ascend; together they ascend. Elisabeth bears away her prey. They don the buskins of the Attic stage and leave the underworld of the Atrides behind them. Divine omniscience will not suffice to shrive them; they must put their trust in the divine caprice of the Immortals. Courage, one little moment longer and they will be where flesh dissolves, where souls embrace, where incest lurks no more.