Jean COCTEAU (1889-1963). Autograph manuscript, 4 pp. in-4. Cocteau's ideas for a series of articles in a new form that he intends to reinvent, a kind of "journalism essay". "I haven't done an article since "Carte-Blanche" in Paris-Midi in 1918. It's a question of turning the poet's special spotlight on the past; of 'taking' under its special light the figures or places that strike the space and what remains of childhood in man when childhood no longer exists (and man is a poet). [...] No polemics - Never from an aesthetic, artistic, political or religious point of view. Light articles. Voluntarily on the fringe of the line followed by my work. [...] Figaro style, a newspaper to be revived, the starting point for these articles. Sarasate - my parents and Rossini - Le Châtelet, the ice palace, the big carrots. Ses. Capello. De max, Sarah Bernhardt, Réjane. [...] Ed. Rostand in Cambo. Mistinguett at the Eldorado, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Léon Daudet. Reynaldo Hahn, Montesquiou, Anna de Noailles, Annunzio, the Hôtel Biron, Rodin, Proust, Sacha Guitry, Diaghilev, the Tango, the war, etc... It would be a game of massacre if I didn't slaughter them. On the contrary. It would be more a question of throwing balls so that the forgotten figures rise again and take their place among the wedding party. No memories or recollections. Simply certain figures and certain settings caught in the spotlight with which stars are isolated [...]. A mixture that has no other plan than the order of encounters. Portraits without the slightest psychological pretence. Like David's drawing of Marie-Antoinette going to her death. Make it clear that this is a journalistic essay. Texts that can take place nowhere else than where they are. Opportunity. Theatre must be theatre. A film is a film. A novel a novel etc.... An article must be an article. (Light). A glance at the surface of the past. On the people and things that have left us a vivid image. But not to try to reconstruct this image according to the truth. To write it as memory has made it, magnified or stripped, as the case may be.