The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)

by Jean Cocteau

  Agatha’s screams resounded from another time, another place. To Elisabeth and Paul they were of less significance than the majestic blizzard knocking on the windows. Dusk had retreated before the lamp’s harsh glare; Elisabeth alone remained beyond its radius, within the shadow of its blood-red kerchief, cloaked in its purple, spinning the void, drawing Paul over the border from the realms of light into the realms of darkness.

  He was sinking. He was ebbing out towards Elisabeth, towards the snow, the Game, the Room, their childhood. Still by a single thread of light the Maiden Goddess holds him out of darkness; his stone body is still penetrated by one last all-pervading thought of life. Still his eyes held his sister; but she was nothing more than a tall shape without identity, calling his name. For still, her finger on the trigger, like one clasped with her lover in the act of love, Elisabeth watched and waited on his pleasure, cried out to him to hasten to his mortal spasm, to accompany her into the final moment of mutual rapture and possession, mutual death.

  Now he was spent, his head fell back. She thought the end had come, put the revolver to her temple, pulled the trigger. With a roaring din, one of the screens crashed on her as she fell. The walls were breached, the secret shrine exposed, raw, violated, a public spectacle, to the eyes watching Paul in the snow-shrouded windows.

  He saw them looking down on him.

  While Agatha stood dumb, transfixed with terror, staring at the bloodstained corpse that was Elisabeth, Paul saw them, splintered in the frosty panes, saw, thronging, pressing in, the snowballers, their noses, cheeks, red hands. He recognized their features, their capes, their woolen mufflers. He looked for Dargelos and could not find him; all he could see was that one vast gesture of Dargelos’s lifted arm.

  “Paul! Paul! Help! Help!”

  But who is she to call upon his name? What part or lot has she in him? His eyes are quenched. The thread is broken. The Room has flown; all that remains is the foul breath of poison and one small stranded figure, the figure of some woman, dwindling, fading, disappearing in the distance.

  Copyright © 1957 by Rosamond Lehmann

  Published by arrangement with Jean Cocteau

  and Editions Bernard Grasset. French title:

  Les Enfants Terribles.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card number: 56-13357

  ISBN 978-0-8112-2141-2 (e-book)

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  First published as ND Paperbook 212 in 1966

  Published in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited.

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