posted on 20 Apr 2025

Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963) was a French poet, novelist and film director who was a leading member of the surrealist and Dada movements that were so influential in European culture between and after the First and Second World wars. His novel, Les Enfants Terribles (1929), which he also adapted as a stage play, is probably his best-known fiction and one he provided his own distinctive, extensive illustrations for. The copy I have read is the one published by The Folio Society and contains the full suite of drawings that Cocteau provided for his tale.

The story of brother and sister, Elizabeth and Paul is not a comfortable read. Cocteau creates a closed, cloying atmosphere that draws the reader into the siblings’ ambiguous relationship which is always teasingly suggestive of incest without ever becoming explicitly so. Paul is a sensitive young teenager who is infatuated with a handsome more macho schoolfriend called Dargelos who deliberately hurts Paul with a stone he has hidden inside a snowball.

Although he is not really badly hurt, this is the trigger for Paul to effectively withdraw from the world and for Elizabeth to become his carer. This enables the two to indulge completely in what they have come to know as ‘The Game’. When they are in The Game they are also in ‘The Room’; a space in which everything and everyone else becomes as nothing – their rules, their desires, become the only thing they are conscious of. It allows them to say and do what they please and argue – seemingly viciously – until one or other gets the last word. 

Initially, the only two people who impinge on the world of these self-obsessed siblings are their invalid mother – who Elizabeth also nurses until her death – and Paul’s schoolfriend, Gerard who is enchanted by the pair and secretly loves Elizabeth. However, when Elizabeth gets a job as a model, she introduces one of her new colleagues, Agathe, to the mix – with the added frisson of the fact that this new addition bears a strong resemblance to Paul’s earlier crush, Dargelos.

You don’t have to be a genius to work out that this mixture has a chemistry that is going to end badly. Add to this already unhealthy and explosive mix a marriage for Elizabeth with a rich man who is killed in a car accident almost immediately, a destructive love-quadrangle and the reappearance of Dargelos who has become an expert on poisons…..Phew.

And if you can still breathe after this cloying and disturbing tale, take a look at the drawings which are almost an early example of the graphic novel form. In the end, you’ll be left to consider the destructive nature of obsessive love. It’s a novel of addiction and for a very good reason as Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin writing for The Independent in 2015 note:

“Cocteau's prose is as sensual as any human form, and the fact that he wrote this while going through opium withdrawal makes this heady stuff: you can feel the call of Cocteau's blood for the drug in each heightened sentence.”

Copies of the book can be obtained in paperback for well under £10 – but you may well find that translations of the French title vary, as does the translator. My copy is translated by Rosamond Lehmann, which I think is considered the ‘classic’ translation.

 

Terry Potter

April 2025