by Jean Cocteau
Downstairs, I had to write the hour—5:00 —when sailors are to be waked. On a slate, opposite the room numbers, were quantities of similar instructions. As I picked up the chalk I noticed I'd forgotten my gloves. I went back up. A sliver of light showed under the door. The lamp by the bed must have been turned on again. I was unable to resist peeping through the keyhole. It supplied the baroque frame to a little head upon which sprouted about half an inch of hair.
Lousy Luck, his face buried in my gloves, was weeping bitterly.
Ten long minutes I hesitated before that door. I was about to knock when Alfred's visage superimposed itself in the most exact manner upon Lousy Luck's. I stole on tiptoe down the stairs, pushed the button opening the door and slammed the door behind me. In the center of an empty square a fountain was pronouncing a solemn soliloquy. "No," I thought to myself, "we aren't of the same species. It's wonderful—it's enough—to move a flower, a tree, a beast. But you can't live with one."
Now the sun had risen. Cocks crowed out over the sea. The sea lay cool and dark. A man came around a corner with a shotgun on his shoulder. Hauling an enormous weight, I trudged towards my hotel.
Fed up with sentimental adventures, incapable of responding to them, I limped about, weary in body and soul. I looked for some version of underworld atmosphere. I found it in a public bath. The place recalled the Satyricon, with its little cubicles, the central inner court, the low-ceilinged room where, seated on Turkish hassocks, young men were playing cards. When the owner gave the signal they stood and lined up against the wall. He then fingered their biceps, palpated their thighs, brought their less visible and most intimate charms into view and passed them out like tickets.
The clientele knew exactly what it was after, wasted few words and less time getting down to brass tacks. I must have been a mystery to those young men who were used to clear-cut requirements and to fulfilling them speedily. They gave me the blankest of bewildered looks; for I preferred conversation to action.
In me, heart and senses are so inextricably bound up together that I don't know quite how to involve the one without committing the others too. It's this that leads me to overstep the limits of friendship and makes me fear a summary contact from which I run the danger of catching the germ of love. I finally came to envy those who, not suffering vaguely in the presence of beauty, knowing what they want, have everything tabbed and filed, specialize in a vice, perfect it, pay and satisfy it.
One of them issued instructions that he be insulted, another that he be draped in chains. To reach his crisis, still another (a moralist) needed the spectacle of a young Hercules slaying a rat with a red-hot needle.
I saw them come and go, it was one long procession of those sage individuals who know the exact recipe for their pleasure and for whom it's all smooth sailing because, no nonsense about it, they pay punctually and the marked price to have a respectable, a bourgeois complication treated. The majority were wealthy industrialists who came down from the North to exercise their penchants and then went home to their wives and children.
After a while I began to space out my visits; for almost continual presence was beginning to arouse suspicions. In France you're apt to run into difficulties if the role you're enacting isn't all of one piece. The miser had better be miserly all the time, the jealous man always jealous. That accounts for Moliere's success. The boss thought me in league with the police. He gave me to understand that you are either a client or merchandise. And that you can't combine the two.
This warning shook me out of my lethargy and obliged me to abandon my unworthy habits. I took to the great out-doors again, where I saw the remembrance of Alfred floating on the faces of a thousand young apprentice bakers, butchers, cyclists, errand-boys, zouaves, sailors, acrobats and other professional travesties.
One of my only regrets was the transparent mirror. You get into a dark booth and pull aside a curtain. Now you are looking through a fine metallic screen, your view commands a small bathroom. On the other side, the screen was a mirror so highly polished and so smooth that no one could possibly suspect that it was honeycombed with spyholes.
When my budget could afford it, I'd pass entire Sundays at my post. There were twelve bathrooms, and of the twelve mirrors there was only one of this kind. It had cost a lot of money, and the proprietor had had to import it from Germany. His personnel didn't know about the observatory. Young members of the working class provided the show.
They all followed the same program. They undressed and carefully hung up their new suits. Rid of their finery, charming vocational deformations allowed you to guess the sort of work they were employed in. Standing in the tub, they would gaze at their reflection (at me) pensively and start with a Parisian grin which exposes the gums. Next, they'd scratch a shoulder, pick up the soap and, handling it slowly, make it bubble into a lather. Then they'd soap themselves. The soaping would gradually turn into caressing. All of a sudden their eyes would wander out of this world, their heads would tilt back and their bodies would spit like furious animals.
Some exhausted, would subside into the steaming bathwater, others would box a second round; the youngest distinguished themselves by climbing out of the tub and,
off in a corner, wiping the tiles clean of the sap their careless stems had shot blindly towards love.
Once, a Narcissus who pleased himself approached his mouth to the mirror, pressed his lips to it and pressed his adventure with himself all the way through to the end. Invisible like the Greek gods, I put my lips to his and imitated his gestures. Never was he to know that instead of reflecting him, the mirror had acted, had lived and loved him.
Fortune steered me towards a new life. I emerged from a bad dream. I had sunk to a rock-bottom unwholesome indolence which is to the love of men what assignation houses and sidewalk pick-ups are to the love of women.
I knew and admired the Right Reverend Father X***. His deftness, his light-hearted-ness bordered on the prodigious. Wherever he went, like some magician he alleviated burdens, lightened whatever was heavy. He knew nothing of my intimate life, he simply sensed that I was unhappy. He spoke to me, comforted me and put me in touch with high Catholic intelligences.
I have always been a believer. My belief was confused. Thanks to frequenting an unsullied company, to reading so much peace in so many serene brows, to understanding the foolishness of unbelievers, I advanced along the path towards God. To be sure, dogma consorted ill with my decision to give a free rein to my impulses, but this recent period had left me with a bitterness, with a satiety which I was in a great hurry to interpret as evidence that I'd been pursuing the wrong course. After so much imbibing of wicked brews, all this water, all this milk revealed to me a future of limpid excellence and pureness of heart. If scruples assailed me, I beat off the attack by thinking of Jeanne and Rose. I'm not barred from having normal affairs, I told myself. Nothing prevents me from founding a family and resuming honest ways. I have, in a word, been ceding to my bent through fear of making an effort. Without an effort nothing good or fine exists. I'll pit myself against the devil and I'll defeat him.
A divine period! The Church cradled me in her arms. I felt myself the adopted son of a profound family. Holy communion, yes, the sanctified dough turns all to new-driven snow, and sets the tranquil soul deliriously aglow. I soared heavenward like a little balloon. At mass when the star of sacrifice dominates the altar and all the heads are bowed, I would pray ardently to the Virgin, beseeching her to take me under her holy protecting wing: "I greet You, Mary," I'd murmur, "gladly I welcome You unto my heart, for are You not very purity? What to You can be our ephemeral fancies, our humble follies? 'Tis all mere chaff, is it not? Can You be swayed by an exposed bosom? That which mortals behold as indecent, in Your sanctity must You not regard all this as we regard the amorous commerce between pistil and stamen, amongst the atoms? I shall obey the directives of Your Son's ministers upon earth, but I know very well that His goodness extends further than the chicanery of a Father Sinistrariu
s and the stringencies of an antiquated criminal code. So be it and amen."
Following a fit of religiosity, the soul cools down again. That's the crucial instant. Man's unsupple and angular frame is not as easily rid as the gartersnake of this fragile sheath that's got itself caught in the rose-briars. It's first of all love at first sight like a bolt out of the blue, betrothal to the Beloved, marriage and austere dedication.
At the outset, everything transpires and is accomplished in a sort of ecstasy. A wondrous zeal lays hold of the neophyte. Later, in cold blood, he steels himself to get up from a warm bed and go to church. Fasts, prayers, orations monopolize him. The devil, who'd been banished out of the door, comes back in by the window, disguised as a ray of sunshine.
One's salvation cannot possibly be achieved in Paris; the soul is too distracted. I decided to go to the seaside. There, I'd divide my life between church and a rowboat. Far from all distractions, I'd pray upon the waves.
I took my old hotel room at T***.
From the very first day at T*** the heat's injunctions were to undress and enjoy myself. In order to get to the church one had to take evil-smelling streets and climb steps. This church was deserted. The fishermen never entered it. I admired God's unsuccess; masterpieces ought never to be popular. Which does not however prevent them from being illustrious and awe-inspiring.
Alas! I reasoned in vain, that emptiness exerted its influence upon me. I preferred my rowboat. I rowed as far out as possible, then I dropped the oars, removed my trousers and my undershorts, and sprawled out, members in disorder.
The sun is a veteran lover who knows his job. He starts by laying firm hands all over you. He attacks simultaneously from every angle. There's no getting away, he has a potent grip, he pins you and before you know it, you discover, as always happens to me, that your belly is covered with liquid drops similar to mistletoe.
Things weren't taking at all the right direction. I contracted a low opinion of myself. I sought to turn over a new leaf and try again. Finally, my prayers became succinct requests for God's forgiveness: "My God, You pardon me, for You understand me. You understand everything. For haven't You willed everything, created everything: bodies, sexes, waves, the blue heaven and the bright sun which, enamored of Hyacinth, metamorphosed him into a flower."
I'd located an isolated little beach for my sun-bathing. I would pull my boat up onto the shingle and dry myself in the kelp. On that beach one morning I came upon a young man who was swimming without a suit and who asked me if I minded. My reply was sufficiently frank to enlighten him as to my tastes. We were soon stretched out side by side. I learned that he lived in the neighboring village and was here for his health, he was combating a faint threat of tuberculosis.
The sun accelerates the growth of sentiments. We cut a good number of corners and, thanks to a series of meetings in a state of nature and removed from the objects which divert the heart from prompt action, we arrived at the stage of being in love without ever having mentioned the word. H*** left his inn and set himself up in my hotel. He wrote. He believed in God, but displayed a puerile indifference towards dogma. The Church, that amiable heretic would declare, demands of us a moral prosody equivalent to the prosody of Alexander Pope. To want to stand with one foot planted alongside the Church on the reputedly unmovable rock of Saint Peter, and with the other foot mired in modern life, is to want to live the drawn-and-quartered existence of Saint Hippolytus. They ask for passive obedience from you, he said, and I give them active obedience. God loves love. In loving one another we demonstrate to Christ that we know how to read between the lines of a lawmaker's unavoidable severity. When you address the masses you're obliged not to allude to what distinguishes the common from the extraordinary.
He scoffed at my misgivings, at my pangs of conscience, he called them weakness. He reprobated my doubts. "I love you." said he, "and I congratulate myself upon loving you."
Our dream might perhaps have been able to last under a sky where we lived half on land, half in the water, like mythological divinities; but his mother was calling him back to Paris, and we made up our minds to go there together.
That mother lived in Versailles, and as I was staying at my father's place, we rented a hotel room where we saw each other every day. He had a good many female acquaintances. They didn't particularly bother me, for I'd often observed the great delight inverts take in the company of women, whilst women-loving men tend to scorn them and, apart from what is incidental to making use of women, prefer to pass the time with men.
One morning when he telephoned me from Versailles I noticed that this instrument, such a fine vehicle for falsehoods, was bringing me a voice I'd not heard hitherto. I asked him if he was really calling from Versailles. He stammered, talked faster, proposed we meet at the hotel at four that same afternoon, and hung up. Chilled to the marrow, gnawed by a frightful desire to know the truth, I gave the operator his mother's number. She told me that he'd not been home for several days and that, because of extra work which was keeping him till late every day in the city, he was sleeping at the home of a friend.
Passing the time between then and four o'clock amounted to an ordeal. A thousand circumstances only awaiting the signal to issue forth from shadow became instruments of torture and fastened their teeth upon me. The truth rose and smote my eyes. Madame V***, whom I'd taken for his friend, was in actuality his mistress. He returned to her in the evening and spent the night with her. This certitude pierced my breast like an executioner's bullet, it raked me like a tiger's claw. But despite my having realized the truth and despite the suffering it caused me,
I still hoped he'd find an excuse and manage to furnish proof of his innocence.
At four he confessed that in the past he'd loved women and that, helpless before an insuperable force, he was resuming old ways and habits; this, he went on, ought not to distress me; it had nothing to do with us, was something quite different; he loved me, was disgusted with himself, couldn't do anything about it; every sanatorium was filled with similar cases. Credit for this ambivalence should be ascribed to tuberculosis.
I invited him to choose between women and me. I thought he was going to choose me and that he'd strive to renounce them. I was in error. "I risk making a promise," he replied, "and not keeping it. That would pain you. I don't want you to be in pain. Breaking off would hurt you less than false promises and lies."
I was leaning against the door and was so pale that he was frightened. "Good bye," I murmured in a dead voice, "good bye. You gave my existence a meaning and an orientation and I had nothing else to do but lead it with you. What's to become of me? Where am I to go now? How shall I ever endure waiting for night to fall and after it has fallen, for day to come, and tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, how shall I pass the weeks?" I saw nothing but a room swimming on the other side of my tears, and I was counting on my fingers like an idiot.
Suddenly, he came to himself, waking as though from an hypnotic spell. He sprang from the bed upon which he'd been biting his nails, he clasped me in his arms, begged me to forgive him and swore he'd send women to the devil.
He wrote a letter to Madame V***, informing her that it was all over. She simulated suicide by absorbing the contents of a tube of sleeping pills, and we lived for three weeks in the country, having given no one our address. Two months went by, and I was happy.
It was the eve of an important religious holiday. Before repairing to the Holy Repast my custom was to go to have my confession heard by Father X***. He was virtually expecting my arrival. Crossing the threshold, I warned him that I'd come not to confess but to relate; and that, alas! I knew in advance what his verdict was going to be.
"Reverend Father," I enquired of him, "do you love me?"
"I love you."
"Would you be happy to hear that I find myself happy at last?"
"I'd be delighted."
"Well then, rejoice, for I am happy, but my happiness is of a variety the Church and society disapprove, for it is frien
dship that causes my happiness and, with me, friendship knows neither boundary nor restraint."
Father X*** interrupted me. "I believe," said he, "that you are the victim of scruples."
"Reverend Father," I rejoined, "I'd not insult the Church by supposing that she negotiates compromises or omits to cross the t's and dot the i's. I am familiar with the doctrine of excessive friendships. Whom can I deceive? God sees me. Why reckon the distance in fractions of an inch? I am on the downgrade. Sin lies ahead of me."
"My dear child," Father X*** told me in the vestibule, "were it but a question of jeopardizing my situation in heaven, the danger would be slight, for I believe that the goodness and mercy of God exceed all that we can imagine. But there is also the question of my situation here on earth. The Jesuits watch me very closely."
We embraced. Walking home beside the walls over which poured the scent of gardens, I consider God's economy and deemed it admirable. According to the divine scheme, love is granted when to one love is lacking and, to avoid a pleonasm of the heart, denied to those who possess it.
I received a communication one morning.
"Don't be alarmed. Off on a trip with Marcel. Will wire the date of our return."
This message left me stupified. There'd been no hint of a trip the evening before. Marcel was a friend from whom I had nothing underhanded to fear, but whom I knew to be crazy enough to head for the moon on the spur of the moment, and never once to take into account the fact that his travelling companion's frail health might well buckle under an impromptu lark.
I was about to go to where Marcel lived to obtain further information from his servant when the doorbell rang and the next moment Miss R*** appeared, disheveled, haggard and out of breath. "Marcel has robbed us!" she cried. "Marcel has taken him away from us! Something's got to be done! Quick, let's get going! What are you doing, standing there like a blockhead? Act! Hurry! Avenge us! The wretch!" She waved her arms, was striding up and down the room, blowing her nose, tucking stray wisps of hair in place, knocking against furniture, catching her skirt on drawer-pulls, tearing her dress to ribbons.
