ABSTRACT
Jean Cocteau commences his novel of 1929, Les Enfants Terrible, with an urban positioning. He locates us at ‘[t]hat portion of Old Paris known as the Cité Monthiers bounded on the one side by the rue de Clichy, on the other by the rue d’Amsterdam’, and tells us how to successfully approach it.1 Cocteau walks us in and introduces us ‘first to a block of tenements, and then to the courtyard proper, an oblong court containing a row of small private dwellings secretly disposed beneath the flat towering walls of the structure’.2
