The Difficulty of Being by Jean Cocteau Read Free Book Online Page B

leap, twisting himself in mid-air and falling vertically into the wings. There they received him like a prize fighter, with hot towels, slaps, and water which his servant Dimitri spat in his face.
    Before the opening of
Le Faune
, at supper at Larue’s, he astonished us for several days by moving his head as if he had a stiff neck. Diaghilev and Bakst were anxious, questioned him and got no answer. We learned later that he had been training himself to stand the weight of the horns. I could quote a thousand instances of this perpetual rehearsing which made him sullen and moody.
    At the Hôtel Crillon (Diaghilev and he used to migrate from hotel to hotel, chased by fear of having their belongings distrained), he would put on a bath wrap, pull the hood over his head and make notes for his choreographies.
    I saw him create all his roles. His deaths were poignant. That of
Pétrouchka
, in which the puppet becomes human enough to move us to tears. That of
Schéhérazade
in which he drummed the boards like a fish in the bottom of a boat.
    Serge de Diaghilev appeared to wear the smallest hat in the world. If you put this hat on, it came right down to your ears. For his head was so large that any head-covering was too small for him.
    His dancers nicknamed him
Chinchilla
because of one lock kept white in his dyed and very black hair. He stuffed himself into a coat with a collar of opossum, and sometimes fastened it with the help of safety-pins. His face was that of a mastiff, his smile that of a very young crocodile, one tooth sticking over his lip. Sucking at his teeth was with him a sign of pleasure, of fear, of anger. He chewed his lips, topped by a little moustache, in the back of some stage-box from which he kept an eye on his artists in whom he let nothing pass. And his watery eye was cast down with the curve of a Portuguese oyster. This man led across the globe a company of dancers as confused and motley as the fair at Nijni-Novgorod. The only luxury for him was to discover a star. And we saw him bring us out of the Russian ghetto the thin, long, glaucous Madame Rubinstein. She did not dance. She entered, she showed herself, she mimed, she walked, she went out, and sometimes (as in
Schéhérazade
) she ventured on a sketch of a dance.
    One of Diaghilev’s triumphs was to present her to Paris audiences in the role of Cleopatra. That is to say to present her to Antony. A bale of material was brought on. It was set in the middle of the stage. It was unrolled, unpacked. And Madame Ida Rubinstein appeared, so thin-legged that you thought you were seeing an ibis from the Nile.
    I am drawing these figures in the margin of the programmes of great occasions that played a decisive part in my love of the theatre. Indeed a reference to Vestris, to Talma whets my appetite. I should like to read more about them.

ON THE MARVELS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY
    THE WORD MARVELLOUS IS IN CONSTANT USE. BUT we need to agree on its meaning none the less. If I had to define it, I should say that it is what removes us from the confines within which we have to live, and is like a ‘fatigue’ which is drawn outwards at our birth and at our death.
    There is a fallacy that gives rise to the belief that the cinematograph is a suitable art to bring this faculty of the spirit into play. This fallacy is due to a hasty confusion of marvels with conjuring tricks. It is no great marvel to produce a dove from a hat. The proof is that this sort of trick can be bought, can be taught, and that such miracles at two a penny follow fashion. They are no more marvellous than is algebra, but present a frivolous and pleasing appearance, less of a strain on the intelligence. Does this mean that the cinematograph cannot put in our hands a weapon able to out-distance the target? No. But if it can do so, it is on the same basis as the other arts, from which people try to exclude it because its youth makes it suspect in a country (France) where, except when it is a matter of defending