Book review - J. Cocteau, Les enfants terribles

I have read Les enfants terribles by Jean Cocteau, in French, and just finished it. It is a terrible, horrible, symbolistic, heavily poetic book. It makes the reader full of disgust and macabre understanding at the end. It has an explicit trait of The great Gatsby (a death on a sport-car) and of Madame Bovary (poison at the end! To exit a difficult narrative situation). It evocates very poetic images: the "boules de neiges qui etoilaient le mur", tears which slip into retracted lips, and come out again, as new tears from the mouth. Cocteau is able to describe the walk of this girl as "heavy, light, flying" and to give you the impression that you are really understanding what that means.

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Les enfants terribles is the right, insightful title. These are the terrible children you see (or you have been) who torture animals. The "vierge sacrée", the protagonist, the "genie-de-la-chambre"-priestess Elisabeth tourtures and dominates all her peers, makes intrigues to them like a spider with flies. It is horrible to see the flies comply and die.

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There is a corresponded love between a girl, Agathe, and the brother of Elisabeth, Paul, which Elisabeth destroys and deceives, giving false information to the two, on purpose, and substituting Gerard to Paul as husband for Agathe.

Why? Because. For caprice. Because she thinks Agathe has better to be a bourgeoise than the woman of his brother. Because she loves Paul, but more than that, she loves his intimacy, she needs this intimacy, and needs to keep that her inviolated kingdom, to get recognition for herself and for her identity, I suppose. Gerard loves Elisabeth because she seems a prophetess, with her dimension of astuce, of ability, her attitude of cruel judge who makes the culprit confess in order to charge the most severe of the punishments. Agathe is grateful and submitted to Elisabeth, and it is only skechted, as a character. Paul is - it is Elisabeth, but simpler, more masculine, reasonable, straighter.

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They both die of suicide. What is left is a broken life, Agathe, to whom the dying Paul reveals the truth, of which nobody, neither Cocteau, seems to care - and a disgusting smell of Chinese solid poison which comes from the suicide of Paul and steps into the narrative by being brought by a double of Agathe, suddenly and badly reappearing in the novel.

Written in 1929. Finished to read on 15 March 2009. Very strong, disgusting.