Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau: The novel cure for infatuation

Literary prescriptions for modern ailments

Ailment: Infatuation

Cure: Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau

There is nothing so sweet and intoxicating as being in the throes of a crush. Your skin tingles at the mention of your loved one's name, your heart pounds whenever he or she comes near, and every gesture takes on a plethora of possible meanings – each with the power to devastate or thrill.

Frankly, it's one of the most pleasurable ways to lose great chunks of your life. But lose great chunks of it you will, for the chances of the love object returning your feelings – or being deserving of them in the first place – are slim. We prescribe Cocteau's strange and sobering little tale of ill- directed desire to help you wise up – and divert your feelings towards a more noble muse.

Teenage brother and sister Paul and Elizabeth live with their sick mother in a large apartment in Paris. Left to their own devices for long swathes of time, their imaginations grow wild, and they develop a destructive infatuation for each other.

When Paul transfers his feelings on to Dargelos, a beautiful boy he knows from school, then back to his sister, and then on to a girl named Agathe – for fixations are fickle – it is clear they are playing a private, incestuous game, with points being scored at each other's expense. As they withdraw from reality and fall deeper into “the game”, we await the inevitable shattering – for such prismatically refractive self-absorption cannot last for long.

If you find yourself in the grip of a similarly intense crush, try switching the object of your fascination from life to the page. Cocteau's prose is as sensual as any human form, and the fact that he wrote this while going through opium withdrawal makes this heady stuff: you can feel the call of Cocteau's blood for the drug in each heightened sentence. Don't waste time yearning for people you barely know. The giddy pleasure to be found in literary highs will last; the delirium of your mortal crush will not.

thenovelcure.com