Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *Présidence fantôme*, [May 1956]; 4½ pages, in-4. On Clouzot’s film *Le Mystère Picasso*. Manuscript with strikings-through and corrections from the article published in *Les Lettres Françaises* (May 10, 1956) regarding Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film about Pablo Picasso, *Le Mystère Picasso*, which premiered at the 9th Cannes Film Festival on May 2, 1956, where it was unanimously awarded the Special Jury Prize. In a short introductory text written by Cocteau in the third person, he notes that he was unable to attend the screening, even though he had been named Honorary President of the Festival, but that he wishes to “write a few lines about this exceptional work “We know Picasso’s reply when asked, ‘Why don’t you go to New York? They’d build you a golden bridge there’—‘And I’d sleep under it.’ […] That is how gypsies live, and that is how a painter lives—one whose ideas gush forth like water from a watering can and who fills his home with nothing but the furnishings of his genius.” Cocteau received a telegram from Cannes from his friends “Pablo, Georges, and Georges” [Picasso, Clouzot, and Auric, who composed the film’s score], in which they raised a toast to their friendship: For Cocteau, this was further proof that “time is merely a phenomenon of perspective, does not actually exist, and that the heart always reigns supreme in a group where Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire rejoice with us just as they did in the Montparnasse of our youth.” He recalls the screening where Picasso and Clouzot introduced the film to him: “I will never forget the vast, shadowy hall—brighter and more alive than the Croisette—where a bullfight was taking place between Picasso and the void, the canvas, the paper, the ink, the inert forces that rage against those who know how to conquer death. Is not the malady of our age that, whereas artists once worked to give life, they now work to forget life? With Picasso, nothing of the sort—or perhaps it is that he seeks to forget through a creative frenzy”… He does not seek to replace the critics: “Since I am now a ‘ghost president,’ my aim was simply to respond to the message from my three friends and to apologize for the circumstances that prevented me from taking my seat in their box to pay a fraternal tribute to their work.”