A minor work from the terrifyingly multitalented Jean Cocteau, novelist, poet, screenwriter, artist, photographer, film director, et various al. My only previous exposure to his œuvre had been the proto-Surrealist ballet Parade, for which Satie had written the music and Picasso had designed the sets. (Those were the days!) Parade was so crazy it started riots; with that in mind, it was a surprise for me to read the carefully measured sentences and elegant judgements contained in this collection of micro-essays.

Although the title means ‘Queens of France’, the subjects are not all crowned royals, but rather Cocteau's pick of the queens of French culture, society, fashion and history. He starts with Saint Geneviève in the fifth century and works his way forwards to Anna de Noailles, spending just a couple of pages on each, and summing up what he sees as their intrinsically French, intrinsically female qualities.

It's an interesting format, and reminded me a bit of various French short story collections about series of different women – Nerval's Les Filles de feu, for example, or even Barbey d'Aurevilley's Les Diaboliques. Cocteau has a similar tendency to see women as symbols of some ‘eternal feminine’, but, generally preferring men as he did, he doesn't eroticise them in anything like the same way.

The sketches were originally written to accompany illustrations in a book, and they are very short. What makes them worthwhile are Cocteau's turns of phrase, which everywhere show a wonderful range of vocabulary and a good eye for descriptive flourishes. The Duchess of Étampes has the air of ‘a mouse that's been changed into a princess’, ‘toujours prompte à se loger dans les fromages’; Louis XIV is described in passing as ‘a monumental masterpiece of self-satisfaction’; Madame de Pompadour is ‘a fairy, but a fairy that changes footmen into mice and coaches into pumpkins’; Anna de Noailles has ‘the thin shoulder of a Spanish Christ’. On Joan of Arc he begins intriguingly:

Of all the writers of France, Joan of Arc is the one I admire the most. She signed her name with a cross, not knowing how to write. But I speak her language….

It's all very fresh and very clean. A relatively inconsequential work, no doubt – but for me, having pigeonholed Cocteau as purely an avant-garde experimentalist, it was quietly revelatory. ( )