Jean COCTEAU. Autograph manuscript signed, Excentricités; 5 pages and a half in-fol. on tracing paper torn from a spiral notebook. On fashion and its audacities, with erasures and corrections "The real eccentricities [...] almost always come from an infirmity that hides itself or from a weakness that accuses itself. He gives examples: the Empress Eugenie, pregnant, "invented the crinoline", the Empress Elizabeth threw the fan to hide a disordered dentition, "the leg sleeves give the change on bony shoulders [...] Byron and his clubfoot take advantage of the pants with underfoot [...] Caesar, bald, wears laurels. [...] And what can be said of the gigantic wigs, the golden fabrics and the lace jabots that cover the royal miseries"... Other eccentricities have other motives: the high cost of gunpowder forces Brummel to suppress it and "forces the Prince of Wales to keep the color of his hair intact. Another Prince of Wales rolls up his pants to avoid the mud of the paddock. Besides, "our dreary long pants were the prerogative of Oriental women. The men wore the tunic or the dress". Cocteau prefers the women "said ridiculous and living their dream [...] to the good taste which consists in imitating each other. [Fashion moves us because it is condemned in advance and must die young. It is what makes its approach so insolent and so sad "...