The White Paper

by Jean Cocteau

My misfortunes are due to a society which condemns anything out of the ordinary as a crime and forces us to reform our natural inclinations.

Pederast knows pederast as Jew knows Jew.

The presence of Dargelos made me ill. I avoided him. I lay in wait for him.

As they hastened towards their own truth they dragged me towards falsehood.

I realized I had taken the wrong turning. I vowed that I would not get lost again, that in future I would go straight along my own path instead of going astray on someone else's, and that I would listen more to the dictates of my senses than to the counsels of morality.

Beneath his badly dyed hair he was pitifully wan.

In any other place I would never have dared stand in the orbit of that arrogant gaze. But Toulon is Toulon; dancing avoids the awkwardness of introductions, it throws strangers into each other's arms and forms a prelude to love.

He had had his nose broken by a wine carafe during a fight. A straight nose might have made him colourless. The carafe had added the final thumb-stroke to the masterpiece.

pas de chance! Was it possible? With that mouth, those teeth, those eyes, that belly, those shoulders, those iron muscles, those legs?

He's already beautiful enough to move a flower, a tree or an animal. Impossible to live with.

My heart and instinct combine in such a way that I find it difficult to commit either without the other following. This is what leads me to cross the boundaries of friendship and makes me wary of casual contacts in which I risk catching the malady of love.

The French find it difficult to tolerate a character that is not true to type. The miser must always be miserly, the jealous man jealous.

Chance led me towards a new life. I emerged from a bad dream. I had fallen into all that was worst, an unhealthy idle existence equivalent, in the love of man for men, to clandestine rendezvous and meetings with whores in the love of women.

I have always been a believer. My belief was confused.

Normal love, I thought, is not denied me. Nothing prevents me from founding a family and returning to the straight and narrow path. In fact, I merely yield to my inclinations through fear of making any effort. Nothing beautiful exists without effort. I will fight against the devil and I will be victorious.

Bread for chanting, bread enchanted, transformed limbs into snow, into cork.

The devil, who had gone out through the door, comes back through the window, disguised as a ray of sunshine.

I wondered at God's failure, which is the failure of masterpieces; yet this does not mean that there are no famous masterpieces or that people do not fear them.

The sun is an old lover who knows his role well.

I was on the wrong track. I hated myself. I tried to take myself in hand again. In the end my prayer was reduced to a plea for forgiveness: 'God, you forgive me, you understand me, you understand everything. Have you not desired everything, made everything: bodies, sexes, the waves, the sky and the sun which loved Hyacinth and turned him into a flower?'

we came to love each other without ever having spoken of love.

If you place one foot in the Church, which maintains that it does not move, and one foot in modern life, you are trying to live with your feet apart.

What will become of me? Where will I go? How will I wait for the night and after the night the day, and then the next day? How shall I spend the weeks?'

I thought how admirable was the economy of God. It gives love when one lacks it, and, in order to avoid a pleonasm of the heart, refuses it to those who have it.

too easy to turn to heaven whenever we lose what delighted us on earth.