Dermithe too old?

Paul was supposed to be 17, but Cocteau insisted that his lover Dermithe be cast. This has many strange implications. Cocteau wanted the film to be totally his, and he had always had a sense of imbuing his young lovers with his personality, in the ancient Greek tradition, and he was convinced that only Dermithe had enough of Cocteau imbued in him to accurately play the part. Melville, of course, disagreed, and regretted the casting. But what's strange, although Cocteau was a genius with a highly developed artistic and poetic sensibility, how he lived his life was two dimensional, so in a sense this film achieved what Cocteau wanted, Paul being an honest sense of himself beyond the character Paul in the novel, and Dermithe fulfilling what Cocteau perceived about his actual personality in life, his highly developed intellectual understanding of ambiguity, irony and conflicted youth notwithstanding. In other words, Cocteau could not escape his narcissism, and ironically makes the film more Cocteau's than Melville's, the latter preferring the complexity of a confused, sensitive youth.