SOURCE: Cismaru, Alfred. “Cocteau Revisited.”Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 40, nos. 1-2 (1986): 69-74.

In the following essay, Cismaru provides an overview of major themes in Cocteau's work and life.

“Lunch at Véfour with Greta Garbo. Paul-Louis brings her to my house and we all go together. What a strange thing: it seems that no one at the restaurant recognizes her. The owner and chef of Véfour, Olivier, will tell me tomorrow that someone had asked if Garbo was Madeleine Solange. And when he answered, ‘My God, no, that is Greta Garbo,’ the interlocutor had remarked: ‘I was sure she was a movie actress.’ Lost is that sense of grandeur, of the legendary, of the sacred. We are so engrossed in the secular now, so bogged down by the transitory and the derisory assailing us from all sides.”¹

This is one of the notations Jean...