The Difficulty of Being by Jean Cocteau Page A

no longer acted. Then the dreams of such great ladies, in quest of dramatic action, materialize and become a setting for them. The one spends her energies on English Gothic, on trapezes, on columns, on plaster mouldings, the other on grottoes and monograms, on tortured bedsteads and on scroll-work anticipating ‘modern style’, oddly combining Greece with the Synagogue, the face of Antinoüs with a Jewish profile.
    The Marquise Casati owned a haunted house. It was not so before it was hers. It was the old Palais Rose which had belonged to the Comte Robert de Montesquiou. * The Comte de Montesquiou claimed that it was haunted. Haughty, a stickler for his due, this man who would have wanted both Mohammed and the mountain to come to him, pursued the acme of bad taste, and it repelled his advances. His mauve gloves, his basket of hydrangeas, his air of mystery and arrogance, put it to flight. Did he think he could seduce it or did he realize his efforts were vain? He died embittered and his house became the property of the Marquise.
    Luisa Casati was originally a brunette. Tall, bony, her gait, her great eyes, her teeth of a racehorse and her shyness didnot accord with the conventional type of Italian beauties of the period. She astonished. She did not please.
    One day she decided to exploit her type to the full. It was no longer a matter of pleasing, displeasing or astonishing. It was a matter of dumbfounding. She came out of her boudoir as from the dressing-room of an actress. She was red-haired. Her locks stood on end and writhed round a Gorgon’s head, so painted that her eyes, that her mouth with its great teeth, daubed black and red, instantly turned men’s glances from other mouths and other eyes. And as they were beautiful the men took in this. They no longer said: ‘She is nothing to write home about.’ They said to themselves: ‘What a pity that such a beautiful woman should daub herself in this way!’
    I imagine that her dresses too were the subject of long study. Like the Casati Isis which adorned a room in the Palais Rose and which we saw in 1945 at José-Maria Sert’s, she was coated in cloth of gold.
    I am reminded of Georgette Leblanc, of her trains of gold and her chasubles, climbing hills on a bicycle behind Maurice Maeterlinck. Artless women, courage personified, marvellous, you loved gold on your fabrics. You could never keep a sou.
    As soon as she came out of her dressing-room, the Marquise Casati received the applause usually given to a famous tragedian at her entry onto the stage. It remained to act the play. There was none. This was her tragedy and why her house became haunted. The emptiness had to be filled whatever the cost; never for a moment could one stop bringing down the curtain and raising it again on some surprise: a unicorn’s horn, dressed-up monkeys, a mechanical tiger, a boa constrictor. The monkeys developed tuberculosis. The unicorn’s horn became coated in dust. The mechanical tiger was eaten by moths, the boa constrictor died. This sinister bric-à-bracdefied ridicule. It left no room for it. It reigned in the house of the Comte de Montesquiou. For indeed extravagances are paid for dearly, even in a frivolous world. Montesquiou collected other people’s extravagances and in this too he missed the mark. How could I not be reminded of the last scene of
La Fille aux yeux d’or
?? † Like the Marquise de San Réal, the Marquise Casati, in the midst of the blood of objects and of animals, victims of her dream, adds more black and more red, disguises herself and turns round and round.
    May these lines be a tribute to her. I suspect that wherever she is, she carries, embedded between her shoulder blades, the Empress Elizabeth’s knife.
    For a house to be haunted there must be commitment. The Marquise was committed in her own way. The Comte de Montesquiou was not. For one can commit oneself at any rung of the ladder. From top to bottom.
    Sartre has raised a great hare here. But why