The Difficulty of Being by Jean Cocteau

by her mother and her brother. When eventually discovered, lying contentedly in a filthy bed among heaps of oyster shells, she never ceased to regret being moved from her ‘dear little grotto’.
La Sequestrée de Poitiers: Documents Réunis par André Gide
, Gallimard 1930. E.S.
    ‖ ‘Hero’ of one of the earliest crime-and-mystery serials by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. E.S.

ON HAUNTED HOUSES
    YOU CANNOT HAUNT YOUR HOUSE AT WILL. IT IS A question of storm and fire. There have been times when mine rejected me. It withheld its assistance. The walls absorbed nothing. They lacked the great shadows of fire, the sheen of water. The more my house ignored me, the more I ignored it. This lack of exchange caused a deadlock. No longer could we lay traps for one another. No trap, no game. That means to live with an empty bag. My friends felt this. And they withdrew like the walls. I had to wait for the emanations to return, to counter one another, to form this explosive mixture which causes our dwellings to blaze. For they imitate us and only offer us what we give them. But this echo speaks and insists on dialogue.
    Of all my homes, rue Vignon was the most haunted. It was almost at the corner of the Place de la Madeleine, up under the roof, and had no pretensions to being pleasant. But there was flood and fire. I could not describe it. It was its emptiness that was full. Furniture, objects came there of their own accord. One did not see them. What one saw was this emptiness, an attic of emptiness, a dustbin of emptiness, an emptiness full to the brim. The ghosts queued up in it. The mob stood tight-wedged. There was no floating whatever. A crowd of shadows propped you up. The main body of the army occupied my room. The rest camped right down to the hall andon the stairs. Elbow to elbow. In heaps, in clusters. These on the floor, those on the walls or on the ceiling. Their tumult was a silent one. Guests liked this room. They did not notice anything peculiar except the whole thing. This whole comforted them, put them at their ease, relaxed them, cut them off from the outside. Those invisible people were my responsibility. They saw to the service, hotted up the drama to the right point. Horrors would break out. The emptiness would then make such eddies that one had to cling to some piece of wreckage. But my company would come into action, smother the flames, stamp out the embers.
    And tranquillity itself, once it had returned, looked like Phaedra, seated in her chair.
    A song of Marlene Dietrich’s was often heard there. The one beginning
‘Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht’
. Recently I was dining at her table. I asked her for it. She sang it to me. The restaurant became my room. It emptied itself, it glorified itself. And the ancient ghosts appeared. And the dead rose from their tombs.
    Beside this room and that of Proust and that of Picasso, rue Schoelcher, which overlooked the Montparnasse cemetery and where the emptiness was inhabited by a mass of objects and forms, I have known haunted houses in which our phantoms played no part. They were haunted by the pleasing craziness of their owners. Their emptiness was full of another sort of emptiness: that of the obsession with emptiness and of a morbid desire to escape from it. The setting here was all-important and the strange appearance of these houses proceeded rather from the presence of things than from their invisibility.
    Good taste never produces spectres of this kind, and ifEdgar Allan Poe had designed a house for himself, doubtless instead of being built on the pattern of his cottages, it would have taken its style from the House of Usher.
    If we must have ugliness, I have always preferred to good taste, which depresses me, the violent bad taste of those women who are actresses without a theatre, tragedians without tragedy, and with a physique predisposing them to extravagance. Such was the case of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and of Rachel when, too ill, she