Jean COCTEAU. Autograph manuscript signed, [1946]; 2pages in-4 with corrections on paper to address 19, Place de la Madeleine (8e). Superb text on the magic of theater, published in the magazine Intermèdes, No. 1, Spring 1946. "I pity the children who never knew the half-open door to the crimson and gold grotto of the theaters their families visited. This was the door, for example, to a bathroom studded with mirrors. The mother was dressing for some cult. Ceremonial was still the very basis of theater. The curtain, the banister, the girandoles, the red velvet trim of the dressing rooms, the chandelier, made up a secret guarded like those of mourning and weddings"... And Cocteau evokes Sarah Bernhardt, "with the eye of an old lioness, under a helmet of false pearls and gladioli", Réjane who "rolled up her dress, her shoulder, her hip, her look, her lip, her undulations", Jane Hading, Lucien Guitry and Mounet-Sully who "uncovered the architecture of his mouth right up to his nostrils", Cappiello's posters, and Sem who pinned these sacred monsters "like insects, with his sharp pencil, at the extreme limit of their grimaces"... He hopes the new magazine will "restore to us the solemn prestige of the three knocks and the curtain that brings forth the terrible archangel of light."