Jean Cocteau in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, France

The life of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was celebrated last year on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in his birthplace in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines. These information banners went around the town hall.

 

Cocteau's childhood home and place of birth is in the background here, while in the foreground is his birth certificate, giving the département as it was at the time – Seine-et-Oise – and his father Georges Alfred (47 years old, without profession) and mother Eugénie Junia Émilie (32 year old, without profession).

Cocteau in Maisons-Laffitte in about 1908.

 

Cocteau, his elder sister Marthe, mother Eugénie (née Lecomte), and a male and female cousin from the Lecomte family about 1908.

 

 Marthe Cocteau.

Eugénie Cocteau in the salon about 1910.

 

Emilie Lecomte, Cocteau's maternal grandmother, by Patrois in 1847.

 

Paul, Cocteau's elder brother, on a tricycle in about 1885.

 

 The transport in Maisons-Laffitte in 1909 or 1910.

A quotation from Cocteau, saying he grew up in a place where horse racing and cycling reigned supreme and where the Dreyfus affair divided the bourgeois world.