Living room
overwhelming sadness, while he was looking for warmth and love
in the clouds of symbolism.
«UNREASONABLE AND TALENTLESS BEINGS»
A
s we go down to the bedroom of the villa Santo Sospir, we
meet Diana and Actaeon, the next participants in the game
of Jean Cocteau. Actaeon is incarnated from the famous ac-
tor Jean Marais, Cocteau’s friend and lover. Actaeon, trained by the
immortal centaur Chiron, was a hunter. Once in his wanderings, he
came upon a river bank, where Diana-Artemis, the virgin goddess
of childbirth and women, was bathing. Enraged by the hunter’s gaze,
Artemis turns him into a deer, and 50 hunting dogs of Actaeon tear the
poor man apart. Later, celestials took the dogs to heaven where they
were placed in the form of Canis Major and Canis Minor constellations.
Love is reproach and reprisal; it is a justification and judgement.
«The ethics of new love, opposing the tags and labels», with these
words, Jean characterized the sacred altar of his art and passion.
Jean Marais, echoing his beloved friend, reflects on the pages of his
book «Histoires de ma vie»: «Every day invalids are born, including
the sick, unreasoning and mediocre creatures. Others are perfectly
healthy, beautiful, gifted. Soon we will reproach bad men for being
bad, criminals — for their crime. Can the hunchback straighten up?
An evil person also cannot become good, unless one has the gift of
judging and correcting oneself. But this power if he had it would be
given to him before birth; he cannot acquire it if he does not have
this gift». They met in 1937, at the Paris Atelier Theater, during the
production of Cocteau’s play «King Oedipus», and remained ten-
der friends for the rest of their lives. And the dogs of Actaeon, the
grandson of Chronos, unrelenting god of time, sought in vain to
rip their love to shreds.
«MADAME EURYDICE WILL RETURN FROM HELL»
O
rpheus and his lyre is another very important character on
the walls of Santo Sospir and in the life of Jean Cocteau (but
instead of his lyre, Orpheus, placed in the fresco of the villa,
holds a traditional bread of the Côte d’Azur). According to Herodo-
tus, there were two Orpheus in history. The first is the son of Oea-
grus, the lord of the river of the same name in Thrace, and Calliope,
the muse of poetry, science and philosophy. The second Orpheus
lived much later, and by profession and vocation he was an Argo-
naut, sailing to the coast of the Black Sea, to Colchis, together with
his fifty brothers in search of the golden fleece of the magic lamb.
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However, the mention of Orpheus
as a singer with a lyre on the ship
«Argo» casts doubt on the version
of Herodotus and suggests that
there was no second Orpheus,
but just in his youth the one and
only Orpheus indulged in sea
voyages and became an Argo-
naut with full rights.
The legend is well-known: Or-
pheus falls in love with the for-
est nymph Eurydice. Charmed
by his divine singing, she wishes
to marry him. Alas, beauty may
save the world, but not mar-
riage. Aristaeus, god of bee-
keeping and rural arts and prac-
tices, distraught with passion
chases Eurydice. Running away
from him, Eurydice steps on a
poisonous snake and dies. Or-
pheus, desperate to get his wife back, takes his lyre and travels to
the underworld, where Hades and Persephone, Death’s duo, agree
to return Eurydice with one condition: Orpheus should not look at
her until they both reach the upper world. When they are about to
leave the kingdom of the dead, Orpheus, unrestrained from temp-
tation, turns around to see if Eurydice is following him. The curse is
triggered, and Orpheus remains alone and faithful to Eurydice for
the rest of his life. He was eventually torn to pieces by women with
whom he refused to be intimate.
Let’s go even further to see how Ovid describes Orpheus’ loyalty
in his «Metamorphoses»:
He refused all nourishment and fed himself
on his own tears and mental pain. Complaining
that the gods of Erebus were heartless,
he moved away to high Mount Rhodope
and windswept Haemus.
The Titan sun god
had three times come to watery Pisces,
finishing off the year, and in that time
Orpheus had refused to love a woman,
either because his love had ended badly
or because he’d made a promise not to.
But many women, passionate for him,
wished to wed the poet and were upset
when he declined. But Orpheus transferred
his love to tender boys and was the first
among the Thracian people to enjoy
their brief spring years and early flowering,
before they were young men. (Book X, 120–130)
Should we look for the causes of Jean’s bisexuality in his break with
Natalya Pavlovna after three years of relationship, which lasted from
1932 to 1934? They broke up after the death of their unborn baby.
Orpheus could not keep Eurydice — in that fateful minute the flame
of passion for a woman extinguished. The fate of Jean, and before
him Orpheus, torn to pieces by the Thracian Menads for his altered
sexuality, was determined by celestial forces wishing to shelter the
great singer and his lyre in the sky, and on Earth — the master of
pauses and omissions, barely noticeable lines of fate, written out
by Jean on the «terrible» (in his own words) white walls of the Villa
Santo Sospir.
Having created the play «Orphée» in 1926, with a horse playing one
of the main roles, Cocteau seems to predict the emotional and artis-
tic history of the 20th century — from the search for new sources of