Interviewer: Do you keep a sort of abstract potential reader or viewer in mind when you work?

Cocteau: You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle. It is fichu.

Cocteau: I will recount one thing; then vou must let me rest. You perhaps know the work of the painter Domergue? The long calendar art, I am afraid. He had a domestique in those days —a "housemaid" who would make the beds, fill the coal scuttles. We all gathered in those days at the Cafe Rotonde. And a little man with a bulging forehead and black goatee would come there girls; sometimes for a glass, and to hear us talk. And to "look at the painters." This was the "housemaid" of Domergue, out of funds. We asked him once (he said nothing and merely listened) what he did. He said he meant to overthrow the government of Russia. We all laughed, because of course we did too. That is the kind of time it was! It was Lenin.