Question 1

What is 'the game' in Les Enfants terribles?

Accepted Answer

The game (le jeu) is the private world that Paul and Elisabeth construct together in their shared room — a world of ritualized objects (including a treasure box), private rules, private language, and private mythology that excludes all adult reality. The game is not described as a game from outside; we are given it from inside, as the natural order of things, so that the adult world appears as the intrusion and the game as the ground of reality. The novel tracks the game's creation, its temporary expansion to include Dargelos and then Agathe and Gérard, and its final self-destruction when Paul and Elisabeth recognize that the game cannot survive contact with sexual love.

Question 2

What is the incestuous element in Les Enfants terribles?

Accepted Answer

Cocteau does not depict incest directly — the relationship between Paul and Elisabeth is not described as sexual. But the intensity of their bond, the way it excludes all other attachments and ends in double death, is clearly identified as incestuous in its structure if not its acts. Elisabeth's manipulation of Paul's love for Agathe — engineering her marriage to someone else, concealing Agathe's reciprocal love for Paul — is motivated by a jealousy that can only be called incestuous, and the denouement makes this explicit. The novel's power comes partly from the fact that the incest is both everywhere present and never directly named.

Question 3

What is Cocteau's relationship to Surrealism?

Accepted Answer

Cocteau is not a Surrealist — Breton explicitly excluded him from the movement — but his work shares many of the Surrealists' concerns: the dream, the uncanny, the irrational, the power of unconscious imagery. Cocteau moved through multiple avant-garde formations (Cubism, Dadaism, the Groupe des Six, the New Objectivity) without belonging completely to any of them; his position is best understood as that of the great mediator — the figure who transmits avant-garde energies into the most accessible forms. Les Enfants terribles is Surrealist in atmosphere but classical in its economy and control.

Question 4

How does Cocteau's film version compare to the novel?

Accepted Answer

The 1950 film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville (from Cocteau's own screenplay, with Cocteau as narrator) is one of the most faithful adaptations in French cinema — it preserves the novel's structure almost entirely, adds the narrator's voice to supply the novel's interior dimension, and finds visual equivalents for the game and the room that are as powerful as Cocteau's prose. The casting of Nicole Stéphane as Elisabeth and Edouard Dermithe as Paul is generally considered perfect. Cocteau later said that the film had 'replaced' the novel for him — that the visual realization had superseded the verbal original.

Question 5

What is the significance of Dargelos in Les Enfants terribles?

Accepted Answer

Dargelos is the boy at school who throws a snowball that knocks Paul unconscious at the novel's opening — and who reappears at the end to send the poison ball that kills him. He is the figure of fatal beauty — the beautiful boy who destroys the one who loves him simply by existing, without intention or awareness. Cocteau used the name Dargelos for a similar figure in other works (it is based on a real person from his childhood), and the figure of the beautiful destroyer recurs throughout his mythology. Dargelos is the game's origin and its destruction; the novel is the interval between his two appearances.

Les Enfants terribles Reading Order

Complete Les Enfants terribles Book List