Raymond Radiguet is renown as one of the most talented French writers of the early twentieth century is based upon his two novels, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh) and Le Bal du comte d'Orgel (The Count's Ball), both written before he was twenty years old.
Background
Raymond Radiguet was born on June 18, 1903, in Saint-Maur-des-Fosses, Paris, France. He is a son of Jules-Maurice Radiguet, a political cartoonist, and Jeanne-Louise-Marie Tournier. He grew up in the Paris suburb of Parc St. Maur, on the Marne river.
Education
Radiguet attended the local primary school and the Lycee Charlemagne in Paris, where he established a reputation as a brilliant but unruly student. By the time he was fourteen years old, his attendance was so sporadic that his father withdrew him from school and attempted to conduct his education at home. However, the task proved unmanageable and was quickly abandoned, leaving Radiguet free to pursue his own interests at the age of fifteen.
Career
Fascinated with literature, Radiguet began to compose poems and essays, using his father’s friendship with newspaper editor Andre Salmon to obtain his first writing assignments. Within a short time, his essays were appearing in Salmon’s L’intransigeant and other Paris newspapers, while his poetry was being published in the avant-garde journals Sic, 391, and Litterature. Such exposure brought Radiguet’s work to the attention of the Dadaists, who dominated the Parisian avant-garde at the time. Recognizing the young man’s literary talent, they quickly accepted him into their coterie.
Radiguet’s most significant literary affiliation was with the controversial, iconoclastic poet Jean Cocteau, who had worked briefly with the Dadaists but had abandoned their nihilistic philosophy and radical literary experiments for a more traditional aestheticism. Radiguet was similarly inclined toward a more formal approach—although his first poems imitated the experimentalism of Guillaume Apollinaire, he cited the classicists Francois de Malherbe and Jean de La Fontaine as his poetic models—and allied himself with Cocteau from their first meeting in 1919, a decision that shaped the course of his short literary career.
An established artist and Radiguet’s elder by some fourteen years, Cocteau was instrumental in the publication of Radiguet’s work: in 1920 he arranged for the release of the first of Radiguet’s three volumes of poetry, Les Joues en feu (Cheeks on Fire), and two years later he persuaded his own publisher to accept The Devil in the Flesh even though the novel was not yet finished. Cocteau also claimed to have been the guiding influence in the creation of The Count’s Ball, encouraging and often forcing the younger man to write when he was tempted to engage in what Cocteau considered frivolous activities.
Despite such efforts, Radiguet remained a rebellious youth and worked only intermittently on his second novel during 1923; in March he was much distracted by the fanfare that accompanied the publication of The Devil in the Flesh, and contemporaries report that he spent much of the remainder of that year attempting to free himself from Cocteau’s personal and professional domination.
Radiguet’s classicist tendencies, apparent in the narrative simplicity of The Devil in the Flesh, are more pronounced in The Count’s Ball, for which he borrowed the plot of Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century classic La Princesse de Cleves as well as her understated, ironic prose style. Like La Princesse de Cleves, The Count’s Ball depicts the growing love between a married woman, Mahaut d’Orgel, and one of her husband’s friends. However, Radiguet changed Madame de Lafayette’s story, in which the husband is completely unaware of the unconsummated affair until his wife confides in him, to include malicious manipulation of the lovers by Mahaut’s well-bred but puerilely decadent husband, and in so doing created an indictment of the excesses of aristocratic society.