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Translated from the French by Dorothy Williams
Jacques Forrestier, the central character of Cocteau’s
famous first novel from 1921, is a parasite and dilettante
who responds readily to to beauty in both sexes. Leaving
his provincial family he comes to Paris to study for his
degree. Indulging in a life of dissipation with a group
of students and their mistresses, he falls in love with
Germaine, a chorus girl kept by a rich banker. The affair,
doomed from the start, forces Jacques to come to terms not
so much with society as he finds it, but with himself.
A sparkling evocation of the Parisian scene of the 1920s,
The Miscreant is also a study of loneliness and youthful
disenchantment showcasing the savage irony and epigrammatic
wit that consistently distinguished Cocteau’s brilliant
and highly individualistic prose style.
‘Butterfly-like, brilliant, febrile . . . Cocteau’s
famous novel was all but a bible to avante-garde intellectuals
of the 1920s.’ – Elizabeth Bowen, Tatler
‘It is the book’s universality that engages us:
its persuasive account of Jacques’s first love affair
with the revue artiste Germaine, and his discovery that
sexual behaviour is far too complex not to contradict the
dreams of an adolescent . . . This adolescent world – recognizable
and timeless – is so well realized the The Miscreant may
seem unconnected with what was to come.’ – Times
Literary Supplement
JEAN COCTEAU (1889 – 1963) poet, novelist, painter,
film-maker, playwright, actor, choreographer and novelist
was the owner of a prodigious talent which spanned almost
every branch of the arts, and to each he brought the same
originality. He was associated with some of the most gifted
figures of modern European culture including Apollinaire,
Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. |
