Jean Cocteau’s Lorraine Passion

Published by Thierry Fedrigo in Le Républicain Lorrain.

An art lover fascinated by Jean Cocteau’s mystical and absolute body of work, Metz author Christian Schmitt has published a new book about the artist he so admires. In it, he recounts the extraordinary love between the playwright and Édouard Dermit, a miner from the Pays-Haut whom Cocteau would make his heir.

By pure chance, he became Jean Cocteau’s last love. Édouard Dermit crossed paths with the poet in a Paris gallery just after the Second World War. Cocteau, accompanied by Jean Marais, his other great love, encountered a man whose raw physical presence was the very opposite of his own.

Cocteau was then fifty-eight and growing old, marked by war, excess and his dependence on opium. Édouard Dermit was only twenty-two: strong and sculptural, he worked underground in the iron mines at Bouligny in the Meuse. He also painted and dreamed of recognition. It was 1947.

After being injured at work in July, Dermit used a few days’ respite to visit Paris. Near the Palais-Royal, he entered a gallery that had been recommended to him and spent much of the day talking with its owner. He confided his desire to leave Lorraine and its shadows behind, and to live instead from light and from his paintbrush.

“It was then that Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais appeared, as if by some miracle. Édouard Dermit was rather shy. He had never read Cocteau’s plays or novels and knew only his films, including Beauty and the Beast, when he was introduced to Jean Cocteau,” Christian Schmitt writes in his latest book, My Friend Jean (Éditions Jalon).

A collision of cultures

Cocteau, the erudite dandy, was immediately captivated by Dermit’s radiant beauty. He promptly invited the young man to join him at his home in Milly-la-Forêt, where, in return for a few services, he could devote himself to painting.

The matter was not settled at once. Back in his working-class town, Édouard told his parents the news. A clash of cultures and values was inevitable. “The transition was not easy for him. He lived with his parents in modest circumstances, while Cocteau was his complete opposite: homosexual, a man of society, an intellectual and a celebrity with a scandalous reputation, it must be said. Édouard’s mother was deeply worried by the association,” Christian Schmitt explains. Dermit nevertheless obtained permission to move to Milly-la-Forêt.

Jean Cocteau took him under his wing, nicknamed him “Doudou” and gave him roles in his films, as he had done for Jean Marais. Dermit, however, cared more for painting than for the screen, so Cocteau helped to make his work known. They lived together until the end of the poet’s life. Dermit did not publicly acknowledge that he had been Cocteau’s lover until 1983.

Far from Parisian circles, Metz owes something of the Saint-Maximin windows to this miner with an extraordinary destiny. The decisive episode took place around 1957 or 1958 at La Californie, Pablo Picasso’s villa in Cannes.

Édouard Dermit, Jean Cocteau and Jean Dedieu were seated around the “Minotaur’s” table. Dedieu, who spoke to this newspaper in 2019, was then a young historic-monuments architect involved in restoring heritage damaged during the war. He was there to offer Picasso a commission to design stained glass for Metz Cathedral. Picasso declined. Cocteau, who knew Metz and was aware of Dermit’s attachment to Lorraine, accepted. He entered the competition but was not chosen, and complained about it. Through the intervention of André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, he was finally offered Saint-Maximin Church as a consolation. “If he chose Metz, it was also out of friendship for Édouard Dermit,” Christian Schmitt notes. It was far more than friendship.

A hymn to immortality

Cocteau’s love for Édouard ultimately led to his adoption, the only legal means by which the playwright could make him his universal legatee. Dermit later married and had two sons, before entrusting the exercise of the moral rights over Cocteau’s work to Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s companion.

Together with Jean Dedieu, Dermit helped to bring his mentor’s Metz project to fruition. Cocteau, an “Immortal” of the Académie française, worked on the windows only between 1962 and 11 October 1963, the day he died at the age of seventy-four. From then on, Dedieu, assisted by Dermit, oversaw the completion of this vast, multifaceted, mystical and testamentary work, far removed from traditional conventions: a hymn to immortality and to singularity.

Christian Schmitt guides us through this intimate aspect of Jean Cocteau’s life. The Metz author is a remarkable figure himself. Cocteau has exerted a genuine fascination over this former tax inspector, who became an art critic, exhibition-catalogue writer and knowledgeable specialist in twentieth-century artists, several of whose works hang in his home.

Schmitt has devoted several studies to the poet. In particular, he wrote an interpretation of the windows, Jean Cocteau’s Stained Glass (Éditions des Paraiges), and owns some of the original full-scale cartoons. He even wrote a play, The Man with Raised Arms, performed at Saint-Maximin Church in Metz in 2016, and worked with the City of Metz on a Cocteau year in 2023, marking the anniversary of the artist’s death. Metz was the place of Cocteau’s eternity.

Photo caption: Metz author Christian Schmitt owns one of Jean Cocteau’s original full-scale stained-glass cartoons. Photograph by Thierry Fedrigo.

Illustration caption: Letter from Jean Cocteau to the people of Metz who had written to him about the windows of Saint-Maximin Church. Written on 24 April 1962 and published in Le Républicain Lorrain on 5 May 1962.