It was the worse for him because he was condemned to love without forewarning of love’s nature. His sickness was unremitting and incurable—a state of desire, chaste, innocent of aim or name.

A child’s reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him.

The Holy Terrors, Jean Cocteau, 1929