Cocteau's ballet was based on the late medieval Lady and the Unicorn tapestries and ends on the motto of the sixth, ‘mon seul désir.’ Rilke also wrote them into The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
“Existence is thus an eternal transformation of the future into the past—an essentially phantom process—a mere reflection of the material metamorphoses taking place within us.”
— Nabokov, The Gift