La Difficulté d’être
Signed by both Jean Cocteau and Josette Day, the actress who starred as Belle in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946).
Published in 1947, La Difficulté d’être is one of Cocteau’s most personal books: a concise self-portrait, both moral and aesthetic, in which he reflects on himself, art, theatre, cinema, friendship, fame and solitude. Neither memoir nor conventional essay, the book offers an intimate insight into the writer and artist at a particularly fertile moment in his career.
Its publication came immediately after the extraordinary success of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, released the previous year and now regarded as one of the great classics of French cinema. Josette Day, who signs this copy alongside Cocteau, played Belle opposite Jean Marais’s Beast. Her luminous performance is inseparable from the visual and poetic world Cocteau created for the film.
The presence of both signatures thus gives this copy a particularly appealing resonance, bringing together Cocteau the writer and filmmaker with the actress who embodied one of his most celebrated creations.