Raymond Radiguet

Raymond Radiguet (born June 18, 1903, Saint-Maur, Fr.—died Dec. 12, 1923, Paris) was a precocious French novelist and poet who wrote at 17 a masterpiece of astonishing insight and stylistic excellence, Le Diable au corps (1923; The Devil in the Flesh), which remains a unique expression of the poetry and perversity of an adolescent boy’s love.

At 16 Radiguet took Paris by storm and joined the frenzied life of the leading post-World War I figures in the Dadaist and Cubist circles, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Erik Satie, and, especially, Jean Cocteau, whose protégé he became.

His first literary attempts delighted his friends: poems, Les Joues en feu (1920; “The Burning Cheeks”); a short two-act play with music by Georges Auric, Les Pélicans (1921); and articles in avant-garde reviews. With Le Diable au corps the critics recognized the youth as a master of the Neoclassical tradition of simplicity and restraint in feeling, thought, and style. It is the wartime story of a schoolboy of 16 who seduces the wife of a soldier fighting on the front. She dies giving birth to their child. The story is told with a mixture of tenderness, cruelty, and indifference that characterizes its adolescent narrator. This book was followed by a second and last novel, Le Bal du comte d’Orgel (1924; Count Orgel Opens the Ball, 1952), an exercise in lucidity, subtlety, and measure. Radiguet died of typhoid, his body wasted by dissipation and alcoholism.

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