Les Enfants Terribles holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction. Written in a French style that long defied successful translation, Cocteau was always a poet no matter what he was writing.

The book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when the present version was completed by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation. Miss Lehmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies.

What started in games and laughter became for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroyed them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy.

Illustrated with twenty of Cocteau's own drawings.