Jean COCTEAU evokes JP SARTRE, Max JACOB and Paris.

Jean Cocteau (1889.1963)

Two typewritten pages with corrections and autograph annotations.

Two pages in-4°. Slnd.

“I asked that someone write on my grave: “At last, I live”. »

Interesting text by Cocteau successively evoking celebrity and posterity, Sartre and commitment, and Paris.

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“ Max Jacob said: “you should not be known for what you do ”. Deep words. The fame that we are granted comes from a thousand false noises, confusing rumors, tics that are attributed to us and which do not correspond to our personality. But it gives us a foothold, it keeps us hooked. Then these superficial reasons for fame will fall away on their own and the work will begin to live for us. This is why I asked for someone to write on my grave: “At last, I live”. Even if I'm wrong, I'm right. For I will live in a number of scattered beings with the same force that made me live in a few whom I love and who know me. I add that the work eats us and wants to live as it pleases and without us .

On commitment therapy. Sartre knows what I think about it. My commitment is to get to the most uncomfortable end of myself. If I committed myself externally, either I would betray the demands of my internal commitment or those of my external commitment. The free man is seen in our time as a coward when he reserves no place for himself where blows cannot reach him. He is stoned on all sides.

Paris is the only capital that constantly talks about itself, sings and praises itself : Paris is this, Paris is that, Paris wonder of the world. This is how these gentlemen and ladies of the Music Hall and the Radio express themselves. Thus a dozing capital seeks to convince itself and to convince others. This is, unfortunately, our only advertising. In New York, for example, in restaurants they sing about all these absurdities on the banks of the Seine and the Marne (…) I have seen audiences in Egypt whimper when they hear them. The lyricists have invented from scratch a France of Nogent which only exists through rhymes and catchphrases. As soon as a work honors France with an inverse rhythm, it is defenestrated and covered with mud. This was the fate of Marcel Proust's work originally. This is, moreover, the fate of everything that constitutes our deep propaganda. »