COCTEAU (Jean). Set of 4 autograph letters signed "Jean" with small sketch of a star, [addressed TO JEAN MARAIS]. 1951 and n.d. All one p. in-4; occasional cracks at folds. - Villa Santo-Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat [Alpes-Maritimes], February 12, 1951. "Mon bon ange, aujourd'hui c'est le soleil, qui te ressemble. Doudou [his companion Édouard Dermit] is naked on the terrace and I'm painting, painting, painting. I TRY TO AVOID PAINTING-PAINTING, TO WHICH I HAVE NO RIGHT - AND TO PAINT ALL THE SAME - AND IT'S DIFFICULT, BECAUSE, IN THIS AREA, PICASSO HAS TAKEN ALL THE SPACE. I have a lot of notes for my play, which is Bacchus, but he's changed a lot. The character is caught between Rome and Luther. If I succeed, it will be the drama of freedom. I'll need time. I can't write such serious stuff with a running pen. So, YOUR IDEA OF TAKING OVER THE [INFERNAL] MACHINE WOULD BE MY DREAM... I leave BRITANNICUS alone for a while because it's all done in my head... Don't jump into the air, I'm thinking of Danièle Delorme for Junie. It's important to contradict all tragic conformism. Orphée is a success... " - Villa Santo Sospir, "mardi gras" February 7, 1951. "My Jeannot, it's raining on masks. It's raining on the plaster battles. You can imagine the plaster mud covering Nice. This morning (Wednesday) the weather is superb - it's always the same the day after Carnival. I haven't told you the RENOIR story. In the end I had it taken... so that it wouldn't disappear. It's an admirable landscape from the best period. The guy, furious at only selling it for a million, demanded a deadline. He'd double the price after a week. Francine was in Santo Sospir. I didn't have the money - otherwise, I'd buy it on the off-chance. It's worth double or triple. Mine is a tiny canvas, a portrait of her son. It looks like a pearl. I'm on the lookout. If [GEORGES] HUGNET has found you another from the Vollard collection, he'll phone me... Mon Jeannot, the Calmanns tell me that our volume [Jean Cocteau's Jean Marais] will be published on March 1st... Give our Moulouk [Jean Marais's dog] a kiss..." - In the Air France plane". S.d. "My Jeannot, all these deaths of friends, men and animals, have overwhelmed me, I admit. I know it's normal to die, but IT WOULD BE NICE TO DIE ALL TOGETHER AND NOT TO SEE THOSE WE LOVE FALLING OVER THE EDGE AND DISAPPEARING IN THE SEA. Moulouk [Jean Marais's dog] never leaves my side. So I imagine him in such force that I come to believe he's there, looking for you from place to place. I'm going to try painting and retyping my room to distract myself from this nightmare. I'D LIKE TO READ YOU THE PLAY AS SOON AS I GET BACK TO PARIS AND ASK YOUR ADVICE. IF YOU CAN'T PLAY IT, I CAN ONLY THINK OF ONE ACTOR YOU'D CHOOSE: GERARD PHILIPPE. But I wonder if fate won't arrange things and if the impossible won't happen. Besides, between the two of us things are made of one soul, with another a thousand difficulties arise and I have a lump in my throat that won't go away... I've spoken to [JEAN] VILAR about it, only I don't have the whole last act yet... ". - S.l., September 5, 1951. "Jeannot chéri, I think Lulu [Lulu Watier, impresario and friend of Jean Marais] misunderstood my intention. My intention was, after your telephone and hers, to save you from the taxman at all costs. As WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS, this sale of shares wouldn't change anything, except that it... gave you a sum that I couldn't raise without this system. As "capital", Milly [his house in Milly-la-Forêt] represents nothing to you, since you wouldn't sell your rising share to a stranger. It represents wisdom...". Jean Cocteau goes on to talk, among other things, about his friend Francine Weisweiller, Sicily and Taormina in particular: "... Her 'panorama' remains, along with a few postcards of rose-crowned young men who are the grandparents of today's youth, a youth ashamed of it [an allusion to photographs of male nudes taken in Sicily at the end of the 19th century by Wilhelm von Glöden]...".