As all readers of Cocteau's [Les Enfants terribles] will remember, the story is caught between two very similar events. They are so similar, in fact, as to make the final one seem like a repetition of the first. Early in Les Enfants terribles Paul falls victim to what the narrator calls a "dark blow" (un coup sombre …). He has been struck by a snowball aimed at him by Dargelos, whose cheeks are flushed with fire (les joues en feu). Gérard saves Paul, so to speak, by taking him home to Elizabeth and the famous "room"; in other words, Gérard has led him to a metaphorical death where he will remain, sheltered from reality. Toward the end of the book Dargelos sends Paul a dark ball (boule sombre …), presumably a poison or a drug (corresponding to the neige of the earlier ball); its inside is reddish in color (echoing that of Dargelos' cheeks), and it is delivered by Gérard. The latter thus "saves" Paul a second time, in a degraded fashion, as he unwittingly pushes him in the direction of actual death. Inserted into the middle of the narrative, like a mise en abyme, the event is symbolically restated as Agathe "strikes" Paul with a snapshot of Dargelos. In effect, both Dargelos and Agathe are symbols of a reality that fascinates Paul, in the full meaning of the verb, but with which he is powerless to cope. The ending of the narrative confirms the beginning as metaphor becomes fact: since one cannot change reality, he tries to escape through the poetry of death—but poetry does not afford sufficient protection, and the only true escape is death itself.

The white snowball contrasts with the ball of poison just as the room of Paul and Elizabeth does with reality; it is only fitting that the snowball leads the reader into the room. The narrative appears to gravitate about those two poles of black and white (or darkness and light), eventually sinking toward the former; as it does, red emerges as a possible solution to the implied conflict, and it constitutes a correlative to the room itself. There can be no solution in Cocteau's narrative, however, for if red is at the beginning associated with passion (le feu de Dargelos …) it is later sublimated in the theatrical rituals of the room (when a red cloth is used to cover the lamp) and finally enrobed in black and bound with death (the inside of the ball of poison). Never, of course, does it come anywhere close to suggesting revolutionary change. A couple of pages before the end, brightness, red, and darkness appear in characteristic interplay within one sentence: "The harsh light of the lamp took the place of dusk, except in the direction of Elizabeth upon whom shone the crimson of the red cloth strip; she remained there, protected, spinning a void, hauling Paul towards the darkness from which she watched him, as he lay in full light."… Life or reality is too harsh to bear and Elizabeth attempts to draw Paul into the safety of poetry; but red and darkness have in that sentence become practically synonymous, with the latter about to engulf the room and its two protagonists.

In order to enter the room a person needs to sever his connections with the world, a circumstance that stresses the analogy between the room and death. (pp. 160-61)

In most cultures, death is a highly ritualized event. Thus, and although such rituals were most probably conceived as poetic shelter against life, it comes as no surprise to find strong ritualistic features attached to the room. Again, statement, which suggests poetry, is at odds with meaning, which points toward death. The word rite actually makes its initial appearance when activities of the school children in the cité are described; at the same time, there are references to the "dark instincts of childhood" and to "animal instincts."… The rites are obscures and are likened to those of a primitive religion. The pattern of the narrative, which was set in the first line of the text, is thus confirmed. Caught within a bourgeois, romantic ideology, it can only go back, not forward. Blinded by the wrongs of the present it can only move in a circle and oppose to them a Golden Age of the past. In this instance it is a myth of primitive society that is embodied in childhood, the childhood of individual man corresponding to an early stage of society. With the word obscure, however, the seed of destruction is inserted into the rituals that attempt to revive a lost paradise—and the rituals in the narrative must end in death. In the room itself, they begin by losing touch with reality. Cocteau's exalted childhood is "a serious, heroic, mysterious reality" … that is assimilated to an "enchantment" (féerie) practically within the same breath as its reality is stated. In that enchanted realm it is impossible either to conceive of death or to comprehend life to the fullest….

During the brief taxi ride the brightness of street lights, the whiteness of the snow, memories of Dargelos' "fire" and of Paul's blood, and the red glow of a fire truck combine to negate the evening darkness and act as an introduction to the room; words such as noir, nuit, or sombre, all of which one might have expected under the circumstances, are absent from the text. The firemen suggest at the same time the rescue mission they are engaged in and the conflagration or possible tragedy they are driving to; they constitute a correlative to the narrative, which attempts a rescue and ends up in death. Red fails to reconcile white and black, possibly because within the ideology of Les Enfants terribles the dialectic process cannot function; only black is real—which is to say that reality is unacceptable. White, through the slang meaning [in both French and English] of "snow," is degraded into a drug, that is, a form of escape in which reality can be ignored. Red becomes theatrical—something of a game, a shift made possible by the ambiguity of the French word jeu—as the fire horn accompanies it with a "human, inhuman" sound and the firemen are transfigured into allegorical representations—"men with golden helmets, set up like allegories."… Gérard, thinking back to that preliminary leg of a journey that will take Paul and Elizabeth out of this world, characterizes it with the word fabuleuse…. In other words, it is a journey leading into a fairy world of the past. (p. 162)

Cocteau no doubt realized that he had told the story of two mythomaniacs [Paul and Elizabeth] whose "life" was a lie. In Opéra he also made his famous statement, "I am a lie that always tells the truth." That, however, is not very convincing, for the "truth" of Les Enfants terribles is an affirmation of despair. On the one hand, the text extols the impossible values of a lost paradise of childhood; on the other hand, it condemns the contemporary world on account of its ugliness and evil. But Elizabeth and Paul demonstrate that the lost paradise is a myth. Those who survive, in the text, Dargelos, Gérard, and Agathe have, especially the first two, made their peace with the world and joined the "system."… The choice between total rejection, which can only be achieved in death, and total compromise, which means corruption of the individual, represents the truth that the text proclaims. Love, too, can be attained only in death, which here is clearly a sexual act…. On another level, poetry effects the same kind of rejection of reality—that is, the escapist poetry of a number of romantic writers, of the poètes maudits. Nearly everyone, including Cocteau himself, speaks of poetry when discussing this novel; it belongs, like the others, to his poésie de roman. One is encouraged to read it as a poem of fate, of which Dargelos would be the personification and Agathe its agent, as suggested by the "fatal" friendship already referred to. One would accept that only if "fate" were to be used as a synonym for ideology. For such an assimilation, however, the word "karma" would be far more apposite. The narrative of Les Enfants terribles is caught blindly spinning in the closed circle of its bourgeois ideology. Cocteau claimed to have been surprised by its success, but he need not have been. In this book, he depicted the only truth most of his readers knew, that of their own doom, and they wallowed in it. (pp. 165-66)