Jean Cocteau was first introduced to the Parisian public in 1908, when he was eighteen. The colorful and popular actor Edouard de Max, with colleagues from the Comédie-Française, gave a public reading of his friend's poems at a theater on the Champs-Elysées. For the remaining fifty-five years of Cocteau's career, until the last hours of his life, he was rarely far from the public eye. His accessibility, his versatility, and his constant willingness to change artistic direction made him newsworthy, but often led to a view of him as brilliant but shallow. Proust was the first to formulate the reproach, in 1908, begging his friend to approach his artistic mission with more gravity. Eleven years later, Gide attacked the younger writer publicly. He claimed that Cocteau was no more than an entertainer, a nimble squirrel in the tree of the arts, and advised him...