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On rushed the train, its human freight asleep beneath a flying tent of vapours rent intermittently by piercing screams; but on this first real journey of her life, deaf to the beat beat of the turning wheels, to the demented shrieking of the engine, blind to the smoke's wild mane that flew above them, she sat, this girl, intent upon her brother, searching his face with avid eyes.
Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles, translated by Rosamond Lehmann, Penguin, 1964, p. 53.
PLACE: Paris
TIME: early 20th c.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Elisabeth and Paul journey
One of the peculiar properties of the room, and not the least attractive, was its likeness to a ship at anchor, moored by a single cable, swinging freely. No sooner out of it than one found it quite impossible to locate; back one came, only to find that every other room had shifted its original position. The sole clue, and that a feeble one, was a faint sound of washing-up from the direction of the kitchen.
Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles, translated by Rosamond Lehmann, Penguin, 1964, p. 101.
PLACE: Paris
TIME: early 20th c.
CIRCUMSTANCE:
She felt she had become a robot, wound up to go through certain gestures; unless it went on going through its paces it would fall to pieces. Her heart thudded, heavy, dull, against her ribs, like an axe falling upon wood; there was a singing in her ears; her brain gave back no echo of her brisk forward march. Dreams resound sometimes with footsteps, mindless purposeful, like hers; dreams lend us a gait lighter than winged flight, a step able to combine the statue's weight of inorganic marble with the subaqueous freedom of a deep-sea diver. Hollow, leaden, buoyant, Elisabeth advanced along the corridor, her white wrap billowing round her ankles, seeming to float her onward like a cloud; one of those foamy cloud-cushions devised by primitive painters to bear some Being of the angelic order. Only a faint humming persisted in her head; and in her breast nothing any more but an axe thudding out its mortal strokes.
Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles, translated by Rosamond Lehmann, Penguin, 1964, p. 110.
PLACE: Paris
TIME: early 20th c.
CIRCUMSTANCE:
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