After looking at myself in the mirror, I looked at Satsuko. I could not believe that we were creatures of the same species. The uglier the face in the mirror, the more extraordinarily beautiful Satsuko seemed. If that ugly face were only uglier, I thought regretfully, Satsuko would look even more beautiful. *
Jean Cocteau La Belle et la Bête 1946
Dear PINK’s
“Returning late from supper after the theatre, she took off her earrings in front of the mirror; Beauty. She smiled at herself with satisfaction. She was learning, at the end of her adolescence, how to be a spoiled child and that pearly skin of hers was plumping out, a little, with high living and compliments. A certain inwardness was beginning to transform the lines around her mouth, those signatures of the personality, and her sweetness and her gravity could sometimes turn a mite petulant when things went not quite as she wanted them to go. You could not have said that her freshness was fading but she smiled at herself in mirrors a little too often, these days, and the face that smiled back was not quite the one she had seen contained in the Beast’s agate eyes. Her face was acquiring, instead of beauty, a lacquer of the invincible prettiness that characterizes certain pampered, exquisite, expensive cats.” **
PINK NOT DEAD!
maurycy
Jean Cocteau La Belle et la Bête 1946
*
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki “Diary of a Mad Old Man” 1961
**
Angela Carter “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” (The Bloody Chamber) 1979
check also:
Jean Cocteau’s beauty and the Beast: more than meets the eye