COCTEAU Jean Autograph MANUSCRIT signed "Jean Cocteau", Prestige des Mille et Une Nuits,[1955]; 4 pages in-4 with red ballpoint pen, with erasures and corrections. Preface to the Thousand and One Nights (Book of the Month Club, 1955); it was collected in Volume I of Critical Poetry (Gallimard, 1959). "The thousand and one nights were long for Scheherazade, short for the Kaliph, and it is from these two dimensions that the prestige of a living work that draws its source in the fear of death is born. In this exercise that forces the mind to empty the arsenal of memory, to bring into the world characters, cities, palaces and caves, to fly all over the world on the shoulders of geniuses locked in vases, the sultana invents the soap opera to follow and the film with episodes. She is the ancestor of all the novelists of our childhood when they prevented us from eating and sleeping. I wonder if the modern youth who are being pushed and discouraged by repeating that there will be no tomorrow still knows how hard we were to read, how hard it is to get sick to read, how hard it is to get sick to read, how hard it hides between the elbows and head in the hands until the carpet becomes a flying carpet and takes us away through Alexandre Dumas or Jules Verne."... Scheherazade's art, always on the line and risking his life, is comparable to that of the acrobat, whose ease "does not prevent us from knowing that he is risking his skin". That is why reading his stories is the most serious thing there is. This is not an "escape", but an "invasion"... And he concludes: "Anyone who has noticed that the dream has the richness of details of life and that life has the confused magnificence of the dream, will be happy to follow the Sultana on her prodigious journey above death". The typewritten, signed, autographed title and a dozen corrections are attached with a blue ballpoint pen.