“Jean Cocteau”
THUS FAR, little serious attention has been paid to Jean Cocteau as novelist. The kind of novel he wrote is not unique to him, but other examples of the genre–and there are several examples appearing throughout the forty year span of 1890-193o-were written by men who reached wide audiences by writing more traditional novels. Today, in some perspective after the 1950’s, with the development of the nouveau roman, the “ironic” or “poetic” novel of Cocteau appears more legitimately a genre novel, a form of writing that comes from symbolism, and that is represented in the work of Barres, Gide, Valéry-Larbaud, Apollinaire, and Andre Breton.
Le Jardin de Bérénice of Barres, first published in 1891, is far more a sequence of emotions, a series of notations, than a story. The narrative clement is radically reduced in André Ci de’s Paludes (1895). The art of Valcry-Larbaud is one of evocation rather than narrative. A whimsical commentary fills many pages of a typical Giraudoux novel. In the novels of Apollinaire and in such a work as Nadia of Breton, the ironical emphasis is uppermost, and the narrative itself is a meandering, the story of a story. These are works that point up the poetry of the incongruous, the startling beauty that can be found in the commonplace, the surreality that is everywhere in the world surrounding us.
As novelist, Cocteau refused the heritage of the nineteenth century. His purpose in writing the way he did was to charm and startle the reader. He proposes enigmas rather than stories. His art is one of sudden contrasts, of association of ideas, of unexpected transitions and interruptions. The novels resemble film scenarios. There are many examples in the texts of the novels of pictures or scenes swiftly sketched and luminous, that could easily be images projected on a screen.
Le Potomak is not a novel, but it might be looked upon as a preliminary exercise in the writing of a novel. It was composed in 1913, when Cocteau worked in seclusion, first at Maisons-Lafitte, then in Ofïranville in the home of Jacques-Emile Blanche, and in Leysin (Switzerland), where he lived briefly in the company of Igor Stravinsky. The book, first published after the war, in 1919, and dedicated to Stravinsky, is a strange medley of forms: a collection of drawings, prose poems, dialogues. More than anything else, it is a reaction against the literature of the day. The combined graphic and literary parts lead the reader through milieux that recall infernal scenes, Gothic tales, philosophic dialogues, confessions of a strident lyrical nature.
If there is one subject that pervades the entire work, it would be Cocteau’s reaction against the picturesque and the sentimental in literature. The monstrous allegorical figures that move about in these pages, bearing such names as Persicaire and Argémone, possibly come from the author’s dream world. They provide the basic elements of the incongruous and the unexpected. Artifice is everywhere, not only in the book’s typography (Apollinaire’s Alcools was also of 1913), but in the shocking notations and revelations of memory.
Both Le Potomak, composed just before the First World War, and La Fin du Potomak, composed in 1939 just before the Second World War, reveal characteristics of Cocteau’s fictional style and method. Even brief notations concerning familiar objects indicate the symbolic use to which they mav be put. A paperweight, for example (un presse-papier) is not merely a crystal object but an intersection of infinities and silences. The unusual names of Persicaire and Argémone were seen once by Cocteau on old bottles (bocaux) in a Norman pharmacy. Underlying this collection of aphorisms and drawings and dialogues is a persistent theme of apprehension, stated sparsely and never sentimentally. It is difficult to say what is actually feared, save a general cosmic tragedy, a feeling of time measured out by some invisible machine of the gods. Cocteau also initiates in Le Potomak a life-long dialogue with other writers and gives them advice on the development of their art and what to expect from such a calling as that of an artist. Whatever the public reproaches the artist for should be cultivated because that is the artist. Ce que le public te reproche, cultive-le, c’est toi.
Only three books of Cocteau can rightfully be called novels in the sense that they narrate an action and a story. But in all three, certain poetic elements of style and technique are predominant. Two of these books were written close together, in 1923: Le Grand écart and Thomas l’imposteur; and the third, Les Enfants terribles, in 1929. Traits of writing, which usually designate a classical style of art, are apparent in the three novels: a logical kind of clarity, simplicity in diction, an impeccable precision that belies a surface directness and may often reveal an unexpected profundity. The text, broken up in brief paragraphs, reminds one of the verset and at times an entire chapter will resemble a prose poem.
The three novels are studies of the mutation from adolescence to manhood. Le Grand écart is the drama of a first love, the initiation of a school boy, Jacques Forestier, to love and to a disappointment in love. The most moving passages narrate the progress of his despair. There is an almost total absence in the book of any naturalistic description. The brief notations are images or actions or comments that are avoidances of sentimentality in this story of an éducation sentimentale. The crisis that Jacques Forestier goes through is deeply personal and painful, but it is composed by Cocteau with the detachment of a newspaper account, of a chronicle that is a mere recording of facts. Throughout the text, the art of the poet is visible in the combination of words, in the coining of phrases that summarize and partially disguise the actions and the thoughts of the protagonist.
The profoundest aspects of the drama are totally hidden, totally concealed within the text. The reserve of Cocteau when he speaks of the heart, is one of the permanent traits in all his work. Already, in Le Grand écart, he is telling his readers that real suffering needs secrecy. The brilliant ellipses, the brilliant condensations are means of blinding the reader to the human anguish of the story. The psychological and moral portrait of Jacques Forestier emphasizes the intactness and the purity of a human heart for which such a style was indispensable. The simplicity and the directness of this narrative are the reflections of Jacques’ heart which, as the novelist says, was capable of elevating everything it touched (coeur intact capable d’ennoblir tout). It is the story of a heart that cannot be compromised. It is not compromised by even the suicide at the end.
Jean Cocteau studied for his baccalauréat in the private school (la pension) of a M. Dietz in Paris. M. Dietz bears the name of M. Berlin in Le Grand écart, and the atmosphere of the school will be more fully developed at the beginning of Les Enfants terribles, where it is an actual lycée. The profound theme of all three novels is the same: the tragic initiation of the adolescent heart when it refuses to change into the compromising heart of a man.
Two very briefly sketched scenes in Le Grand écart are the clue to the drama of Jacques Forestier, and they are in fact the clue to every Cocteau hero. At the age of eleven, in a hotel in Miirren (Switzerland), Jacques watched a very handsome couple, a young man and woman in an elevator (la cage de l’ascenseur). Immediately afterwards, when he looked at himself in a mirror, he compared himself to the couple and wanted to die. We had learned in a passage just preceding the elevator scene, that Jacques’ own beauty displeased him, that it was ugly to him. And we had learned at the very beginning of the narrative that the destiny of Jacques Forestier was to be wounded forever by beauty.
A second episode, at the age of eighteen, takes place in Venice, at a masked ball, when Jacques has a further intuition concerning the beauty of those around him who are unmasked by the masks, whose beauty is the demonstration of a spectacular city and a spectacular social ritual. At the age of eleven and at eighteen, Jacques Forestier’s soul was wounded by the shock of beauty, by such a fatal shock that the rest of his life, unconsciously to a large degree, will be spent in searching for that beauty. Tire sight of the young couple in the elevator in Miirren had the tragic effect on the boy Jacques that the snowball will have on Paul, in the opening scene of Les Enfants terribles.
Jacques of Le Grand écart, Paul of Les Enfants terribles, and the narrator of Le Livre blanc, are of the race of tragic heroes, fatally attracted to a form of beauty that will cause their destruction. After receiving the fatal blow, in the form of a snowball, or an unexpected vision in an elevator, the hero will continue to live as if nothing had happened. But such an experience of beauty is comparable to a wound, invisible and fatal that will not cease deepening until the hero’s life is consumed by it. The purity of Jacques and of Paul is intact throughout the brief years they are permitted to live. And they live and act as if they had not been wounded by the powerful prestige of beauty. But the mechanics of the attraction which secretly dominates their lives, counts out the minutes as if it were an infernal machine of the gods.
The theme of death, as important in the writings of Cocteau as the theme of beauty, impinges so closely on the fatal aspect of beauty that finally the themes become identical. The long passage of Jacques Forestier’s attempted suicide is an expression of his will to maintain the vision of beauty and not allow it to succumb to the change of time. Jacques, as well as every other hero of Cocteau, knows that a man’s life, if it continues, is governed by his intelligence, by his superficial intelligence, which encumbers it with artifices, with all the devious ways the purity of man’s spirit is tricked. Le Grand écart contains one of Cocteau’s striking images of the swiftness of life, or rather the swiftness of death: that of a train carrying all classes of men simultaneously to death. Malgré la différence des classes, la vie nous emporte tous ensemble, à grande vitesse, dans un seul train, vers la mort. Those wounded by beauty will wish the speed of such a voyage and exult over it in a self-determined destruction.
Written just a few months after Le Grand écart, Thomas l’imposteur is Cocteau’s novel on the war. Encouraged by the example of La Chartreuse de Parme, Cocteau, like Stendhal, has written a war story, an historical novel in which History is present but not in the role of arbitrary judge. It is the history of a war without the bombast of war, without the forced inflated sentiments of war. In the same way, and at the same time, Raymond Radiguet was to follow the example of La Princesse de Clèves in composing Le Bal du comte d’Orgel. The year of 1923 was also the year of Radiguet’s death.
The war of 1914 is the setting of Thomas l’imposteur. Guillaume Thomas is sixteen and encourages in himself dreams of an heroic destiny. He borrows a uniform, appropriâtes a famous name, de Fontenoy, and claims he is the nephew of General de Fontenoy. Then Guillaume Thomas de Fontenoy begins to live his part of impostor, which is really his dream. He exemplifies for Cocteau the poet who reveals in his art the adventures that every man conceals in himself.
Guillaume Thomas charms everyone. He inspires confidence in those he meets. In the trenches at the Belgian front, he is unharmed. In the game he plays with death, he lives as under a spell. The imposture allows Thomas to live the myth he created for himself and to die as a hero. The war itself is presented as a spectacle seen from the wings of a stage. Thomas l’imposteur derives from Cocteau’s personal memory of the war when he was in Belgium, at Nieuport, in 1915, with a group of marines (fusiliers marins). It was a time, as he writes in the novel, when the scamps won out over the good pupils (les polissons l’emportent sur les forts en thème). To some extent, Cocteau’s own role at the front was based upon a lie. Thomas is in many ways a stylized portrait of Jean Cocteau. The resemblance between the two is probably truer than what an autobiography would reveal.
The style of Thomas l’imposteur is more stendhalien than the books of Stendhal. The narrative moves swiftly, in a form that is elegant and precise and reserved in its expressions of feeling. The formula used by Stendhal to describe the art he wanted to create would apply to the art of Cocteau: a story in which everything would be simultaneously true and ideal (où tout fût à la fois vrai et idéal). The total absence of sentimentality in Thomas l’imposteur provides the book with the evenness of gray and white throughout the narrative. The tone of irony is present but it is detached and not malicious. The disorder of the war is present, but it is seen as from a distance, and passed over quickly. From the beginning, the reader senses that Thomas is moving toward death and he follows that swift movement rather than the surrounding disorders of war. Truth, for Cocteau, in its deepest sense, is in Thomas. The book is not about war, but about the soul of Thomas where war is reflected in the importance of the young hero, in his dreams and exaltation and in the dangers he welcomes as if they were poems to be read.
Cocteau’s art makes the final scene inevitable and truthful, when Tliomas alone walks into a climate of war and is shot. We realize that the bullet that pierces his heart is the reality of life which will always defeat such a creature of charm and fantasy. Thomas is one of the prodigal sons of the twentieth century. He is the adolescent hero who incarnates the wisdom and the fate of adolescence. He continues the lineage of Augustin in Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), and of Lafcadio in Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (1914), and of Marcel in Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann (1913). These three books, completed before the outbreak of the war in 1914, are prolonged in the adolescent hero Thomas who participates in the war and learns that the world is ready to receive a youth so full of fantasies, so free in his movements, so able to impose his imposture on the world of adults.
The adolescent hero, created by Jean Cocteau in the twenties in Le Grand écart and Thomas l’imposteur at the beginning of the decade soon after the war, and analyzed more fully in the two books at the end of the decade—the unsigned Le Livre blanc (1928) and Les Enfants terribles of 1929—is of a dangerous race, almost a race of privileged angels. This adolescent hero, created not only by Cocteau but by an adolescent century as well, lives by the belief that boldness and originality are forms of beauty to be exploited because the years of adolescence are brief. Life triumphs for the adolescent in his defiance of convention. The poetry of such a life is the upsetting of established values, but it is so brief, so swift that the disorder it brings is only temporary, only imaginary.
By their own lives Radiguet and Cocteau lived more closely to the heroes of Thomas l’imposteur and Le Diable au corps than most of the major writers of the first three decades who were attracted to the adolescent hero: Gide, in Les Caves du Vatican and Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Proust in Du Côté de chez Swann and A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, Alain-Fournier in Le Grand Meaulnes, Montherlant in Les Bestiaires, Thomas Mann in Blood of the Walsungs, Aldous Huxley in Point Counterpoint.
Le Livre blanc, first published in 1928 without the author’s name is a version of Le Grand écart and announces the theme of Dargelos, to be used a few months later in Les Enfants terribles and in Le Sang d’un poète. It is Cocteau’s clearest statement on the tragic effect of beauty on those who appear to be the least affected by it. Les privilèges de la beauté sont immenses. Elle agit même sur ceux qui paraissent s’en soucier le moins.
The word enfant terrible has been lavishly applied to Coeteau himself. And even at the moment when he was received into the Académie Française, because there he seemed more than ever the enfant terrible in midst of the conservative solemn group of academicians. André Maurois’ gracious word of welcome in his reception speech was his advice to Cocteau to remain Heurtebise, to remain l’enfant terrible. The word has come to designate not only Cocteau, not only the type of adolescent hero, but also a new type of creative spirit, one comparable to the poète maudit as defined by Verlaine a generation earlier. He is not unlike the chassé, the outlaw hunted by the police. He is often an apatride, a man without nationality.
In Les Enfants terribles, Cocteau gives to the already invented adolescent hero a new ardor and a new ingenuousness. The enfants terribles are almost mythic creatures endowed with some form of grace that permits them to defy conventions and all rational approaches to their problems. They are avid and curious, graceful and irreverent. With their beauty and the good fortune that presides over much of their lives, they make the adults around them seem like Pharisees. The action of their lives seems to be improvised. Even in their movements of ferociousness there is poetry. They are children whose pleasure comes not in playing with toys but in taking apart the toys in order to see what makes them work. In American literature they have their counterparts in the adolescent heroes of Salinger and Carson McCullers. More so than in Cocteau, they were incarnated in Raymond Radiguet, whose life bears a strange identity with a fictional enfant terrible.
He reappears in Dargelos, who throws the hard snowball in the opening scene of Cocteau’s novel, and in Paul himself who is wounded by the snowball. The insolent formulas that Paul and Elisabeth hurl at one another are comparable to the snowballs fashioned by the ruthless Dargelos. Lafcadio, of Les Caves du Vatican, was this type of enfant terrible, who presided over the years between his appearance, in 1914, and approximately 1925. Paul, appearing at the end of the twenties, represents another type, a disillusioned enfant terrible, more introverted, more tragic. Early in the decade, the immediate life of action pursued by the adolescent hero was a liberation from a life of dogma and bourgeois morality. But late in the decade, the Dionysian way of life had grown into a deep-seated restlessness. The ubiquitous agile Lafcadio had become the immobilized youth sitting in one of the cosmopolitan bars, or Paul refusing to leave the suffocating atmosphere of his room.
Accused by his critics on countless occasions of creating “merely” fantasy characters in his books, characters that have no relationship with the seriousness of life, Cocteau today is being revindicated by readers who find in Dargelos of the novel, in Orphée of the film, in Heurtebise of the poem, examples of fictional characters who come from the deepest part of Cocteau’s understanding of himself and of his period in history. It is increasingly clear that nothing in Cocteau’s work is gratuitous or lacking in seriousness or merely eccentric. His fictional art is not a copy of reality, but the creation of a further reality. He imposes characters distinct from other fictional characters. Among themselves, Cocteau’s heroes, Jacques Forestier, Thomas l’imposteur, and Paul l’enfant terrible bear resemblances, and a distant relationship with Orphée the assassinated poet.
While staying at a clinic in Saint-Cloud, in 1929, Jean Cocteau wrote a journal account of his recovery from his addiction to opium. The journal was later published under the title Opium. The idea of Les Enfants terribles occurred to him forcibly at this time in the clinic and he wrote the novel within the space of three weeks. It is based on school memories of la Cité Monthiers, of snowball fights, of the pupil Dargelos, of the story of a brother and sister. These were some of the ingredients from reality that went into the composition of this work that had an immediate success, and that has continued to the present time to interest a wide public, especially a youthful public. It is perhaps the most tragic expression that Cocteau ever gave to human destiny. Its success, during the decade following its publication, was such that the novel was compared, in terms of its effect on the public, to Goethe’s Werther.
It is distinctly a novel about adolescence, about the action of destiny which draws a brother and sister toward a tragic end because they have a purity of spirit, because they refuse to alter the purity and the laws of adolescence. A dramatic tension never relaxes in the narrative from the beginning to the end. From the viewpoint of the adult world, the behavior of the brother and sister, Paul and Elisabeth, is inhuman throughout the story. They make no compromise with the society from which they are determined to live apart. They are bound together by symbolic games which are rites of a logic that is true only for them. Two outside friends are admitted to their tiny world, Gérard and Agathe, and their intermittent presence makes the actions and thoughts of Paul and Elisabeth appear more monstrous than ever. As long as the games can be played in the room they share together, their protective isolated world remains intact. Only when Elisabeth, the stronger of the two, realizes that Paul is attempting to leave the room and the games that had magically joined them does she kill her brother and take her own life.
The room, like the unity of place in a classical tragedy, is literally the world in which Paul and Elisabeth live. It is the setting of their lives and of their pact with destiny, their resolution not to compromise with the false world of adults. But it is also, in its compressed disorder, the picture of their iiiner life where they live in accordance with what Cocteau calls poetry. In Les Enfants terribles in particular, which is perhaps the clue to all the other works, poetry is an obscure force controlling the life of an individual, one of the mysterious names for death. With the very first scene of the novel, we are in the presence of death, and we never leave it, until death declares itself violently and blatantly in the final scene. At that moment, the room, which has served as a temporary beguiling tomb, takes off and moves into some vaster space far above the fixed site of tragedy.
At one point in the text the room is called a theatre whose performance begins at eleven in the evening: le théâtre de la chambre ouvrait à 11 heures du soir. It is exactly that: the setting of a play where Paul and his sister enact their roles and develop their characterizations. One is a spectator for the other, and when Gerard and Agathe are present in the room, Paul and Elisabeth are both actors who have a very real sense of performance. The first appearance of Dargelos initiates the action of the play. The snowball scene outside the school in the late afternoon when it is turning dark, is the prologue, after which the action continues for the most part in the lighted bedroom. At the end of the “play,” the black ball of poison, sent by the invisible Dargelos, instigates the tragic epilogue. The initial wound was deadly, and the tragedy terminates when the time allotted runs out for the two protagonists.
From the very beginning, when Paul, after the accident, is brought into the room by Gérard, and Elisabeth mocks both of them, but begins to take care of her brother, we realize that the lives of the brother and sister have been so joined, so conjugated one with the other, that they form one destiny. ‘I’his early scene prepares us for the dual suicide, which is one suicide, at the end. Gérard watches them and listens to them in bewilderment. He will remain the innocent, the bystander who understands nothing, but who feels the strong attraction to the brother and sister which is the attraction felt by readers of the novel, and the spectators of the film. He is hypnotized and has no real need of understanding. Tragedy exerts on its spectators the power of hypnosis and involves them within an action that is both inexplicable and fatal. When Agathe comes into the room in the early part of the novel, her resemblance to Dargelos forces us to suspect what actually does happen in the outer aspect of the plot: Paul’s attraction to her and finally his love for her. This love is a solemn part of the rites of adolescence. These rites were celebrated in the opening snowball scene and at the end when Elisabeth wills her brother’s and her own death. The doors of the room are closed forever. The tragic ending of adolescence is transcribed in the form of an apotheosis. The game of childhood is finally played for keeps.
Between these two moments in Les Enfants terribles: the prologue in which destiny announces itself in the celebration of a love ritual (le collège célèbre ses sacrifices) and the epilogue in which destiny concludes its action in the same celebration of the same love, speechless and violent, we watch Paul and Elisabeth enact a few scenes of their lives with the cold imperturbability of those who know instinetively that the moments granted to them for living are few and will soon be exhausted. They accept the fatal promiscuitv of their room because they know it is all they will have in life. They are of another race and they refuse to expose themselves uselessly to the commonplace catastrophes of mankind.
Childhood demands a secret place. Children habitually construct some kind of retreat from the world, a site cut off from the impinging world of adults. The novelist shows us this place—the room of the brother and sister—and its fatal promiscuity. They live concealed from any family, from any city, from any historical period, and they behave in accord with the logic they improvise, as within a game. At first, Paul and Elisabeth are indifferent to the intruders Gérard and Agathe. Elisabeth’s marriage to Mikhael was only a brief episode—one has the premonition of its brevity from the beginning—and on Mikhael’s death, the room is reconstructed. Elisabeth had never interrupted the spell of childhood, she had simply annexed Mikhael as a subsidiary game. But when she realizes that Paul’s love for Agathe means the end of the enchantment, she undertakes to perform the one act that will terminate childhood and the reign of the room. Anything else would be a compromise, a way of permitting the spell of childhood slowly to change, slowly to fuse with the logic of adult make-believe.
The beauty of Les Enfants terribles is oracular. Elisabeth held longer than Paul the dreams of childhood; she cherished longer than her brother did the perfect happiness of childhood games. And this permits her, at the end of the novel, to become the great actress, alone in the house, convinced of a supernatural mission, as she mounts and descends the stairway. She is the sister who has now truly become Electra, the preserver of values, whose greatness is enhanced by the absolutism of the act she commits. She defies everyone and everything. Seule contre tous avec la chambre, elle bravait Agathe, elle bravait Gérard, elle bravait Paul, elle bravait le monde entier. Her characterization is both that of a child and a criminal. Each one of these parts cancels out the other, and she finally appears as a goddess presiding over the destiny of her brother, infallible and inhuman. She is the figure of death, cohabiting with Paul, until the time comes for her to take over her brother and convert a life story into a fable. The ending of the book is an assumption. The brother and sister rise up through space to become a constellation, and even the room is released from its bondage as if it were a balloon. The earth and the pitiable cries of the human race are left so far below that they become indistinct and indistinguishable in space and time.
The writing of Les Enfants terribles is such that at no one point in the narrative is the imagination of the reader restricted. As he reads, he creates another world beside the story of Paul and Elisabeth. It is a world to accompany and explain theirs. The economy of the writing is such that another spiritual order is necessary for the reader, in order to accept the bareness and the coldness of the written story. The text of Cocteau needs an illumination from outside, from the reader’s knowledge of mankind and mythological heroes, from his knowledge of city apartments and supernatural forces that control and explain human destiny. The tensed bareness of Cocteau’s style in Les Enfants terribles comes from the agility with which he moves back and forth between the concentrated promiscuity of the room where two lives are so joined that they really make one life, and the limitless freedom of the spirit, which is the imagination of childhood that needs only a few talismans kept in a drawer to create an existence without bonds and obligations.
Les Enfants terribles is the first full study of the theme of fate in the work of Cocteau. It is never totally absent from his earlier works, and it will be deepened in the film of 1932, Le Sang d’un poète, and in the play of 1934, La Machine infernale. All three works are illustrations of the familiar romantic thesis that the poet writes with his blood. The snowball and the black balls of poison, the fetichistic objects kept in the drawer of the children’s room, and the room itself are used magically to convey the idea of the life controlled by invisible forces. This use of trucages (tricks) will be everywhere in Le Sang d’un poète, and in the myth of Oedipus of La Machine infernale. The esoteric is a somewhat disguised ingredient in this novel, but it becomes obvious in the black ball of poison at the end by means of which all the themes are fused into the one theme of timed fatality.
The art of the film and the art of the stage are purely the arts of illusion where Cocteau is justified in experimenting with the problem of illusion and reality. But Paul in the novel, as well as the poet in the film, and Oedipe in the play, are all prototypes of the searcher, of the man looking for the truth behind the lie or the illusion. Whether it be in a snowball, or a statue, or a scarred foot, Cocteau’s hero is the youth eager to read his destiny, to piece together the meagre events of his life in order to understand his life and see it on the walls of a room or in the lines of a soothsayer. Les Enfants terribles is the first major effort of Cocteau to answer the harassing question: how far can a man know his destiny? how can he know himself? The female figure in La Machine infernale is the sphinx destined to undo men one after the other. 111 Le Sang d’un poète the statue of a woman is in the poet’s room and speaks cryptic sentences destined to warn and predict. In Les Enfants terribles, Elisabeth is first the sister of Paul, but she becomes by the end of the novel a sphinx-like goddess who has the power to condemn and slay in order to preserve in her own mysterious way the charmed life of the hero who has been assigned to her for questions about the reason for life and the fatality of death.
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