The Devil in the Flesh Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH

  “A triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece.”

  —NEW STATESMAN

  “Christopher Moncrieff’s new translation carries Radiguet’s frank, staccato prose well. The confessional honesty of the language is what makes the book both shocking and sad”

  —TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  “The Devil in the Flesh is unretouched and seems shocking, but nothing so resembles cynicism as clairvoyance. No adolescent before Radiguet has delivered to us the secret of that age: we have all falsified it.”

  —FRANCOIS MAURIAC

  “Although Radiguet was so young, he had managed to zone in on the perversity of human love with an accuracy which anticipates, or is in parallel development with, Freud.… His insights compel us to keep reading, in the unpleasant knowledge that we may learn something, possibly even about ourselves.… One of the measures of the book’s brilliance is that its morality, or its amorality, is not clear-cut.”

  —THE GUARDIAN

  “A masterpiece of promise.”

  —JEAN COCTEAU

  THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH

  RAYMOND RADIGUET was born in 1903 in Saint-Maur, a small town outside Paris. He was the son of a cartoonist, but little else is known about his childhood until, at age 16, he dropped out of school after an affair with the wife of a soldier off fighting in the first World War, to go to Paris. Once there he quickly began writing for the magazine Sic, alongside writers such as Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, and he befriended many notable Modernists, including Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Despite his age, he also quickly developed a reputation for fast living; Ernest Hemingway would later accuse him of sleeping with Cocteau, among others, to advance his career. At the age of 18, after writing a collection of poems that would only be published posthumously, Les joues en feu, Radiguet moved to a fishing village near Toulon to work on the novel that would become his masterpiece, The Devil in the Flesh, which was based on his high school affair. Cocteau would later claim that he’d had to lock Radiguet in his hotel room to keep him from drinking binges rather than writing. The author’s youth and the scandalous story made the book a sensation, but Radiguet did not have long to enjoy his fame. Less than a year later, shortly after taking a trip with Cocteau to the country to finish a second novel, Le Bal du comte d’Orgel, Radiguet died of typhoid fever at age 20. Composer Francis Poulenc said of his death, “For two days I was unable to do anything, I was so stunned.”

  CHRISTOPHER MONCRIEFF is one of the world’s premier French translators. He has translated the work of Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, and numerous other French masters.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH

  Originally published in French as Le Diable au corps, Grasset, 1923

  © 2012 Melville House Publishing

  Translation and translator’s afterword © 2010, Christopher Moncrieff

  Published by arrangement with Pushkin Press

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-057-0

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Translator’s Afterword

  I

  I AM GOING TO BRING A GREAT DEAL OF CRITICISM on myself. But what can I do about it? Is it my fault if I turned twelve a few months before war was declared? The turmoil I went through during that most unusual time was undoubtedly of a kind that you don’t experience at that age; yet since, despite outward appearances, there is nothing that has the power to make us get older, I had no choice but to behave as a child in the course of an adventure that would have made a grown man feel awkward. My classmates, too, will have memories of the period that are very different from those of their elders. People who reproach me should try and imagine what the War was for so many young boys—a four-year-long holiday.

  We lived at F …, beside the River Marne.

  My parents didn’t much approve of friendship between the sexes. As a result, that sensuality with which we are all born, and which expresses itself before it has learnt some discernment, gained rather than lost ground.

  I’ve never been one to dream. What to others, more gullible, appears to be a dream, to me seems more real than cheese does to a cat, despite the glass lid that covers it. And yet the glass cover is still there.

  If the glass breaks, the cat makes the most of the opportunity, even if its master was the one who broke it and cut his hand in the process.

  Until I was twelve I never even thought of flirtations, except with a young girl called Carmen, to whom I wrote a letter which I got a younger boy to deliver, and in which I expressed feelings of love for her. I used this love as an excuse for asking her to go out with me. The letter was given to her in the morning, before lessons. I had singled her out as the only little girl with whom I had something in common, because she was smartly dressed and came to school with her younger sister, like me with my younger brother. In order to keep these two witnesses quiet I had dreamt up the idea of marrying them off in some way. So with my letter I enclosed one from my brother, who couldn’t write, for young Mademoiselle Fauvette. I explained this act of intercession to my brother, and how fortunate we were to happen upon two sisters of our own age who were blessed with such distinctive Christian names. But when I got back to school after lunch at home with my parents, who spoilt me and never told me off, I realised sadly how much I had misjudged Carmen’s respectable upbringing.

  The other boys had just sat down at their desks—me in my capacity as top of the class being crouched at the cupboard at the back of the room to get books for reading out loud—when the headmaster came in. The others stood up. He had a letter in his hand. I went weak at the knees, dropped the books and picked them up again while the head spoke to the fo
rm master. The boys in the front row turned to look at me, blushing bright red at the back, because they heard my name being whispered. Eventually the headmaster called me over, and by way of subtle punishment without giving the others any wrong ideas, or so he thought, he congratulated me for having written a letter of twelve lines without any mistakes. He asked if I had written it by myself, and then invited me to come to his study. We never got there. He took me to task in the school yard, in a sudden tirade. What most offended my sense of moral decency was that he judged it just as serious to have stolen a piece of writing paper as to have compromised the young girl (whose parents had passed on my declaration to him). He threatened to send it to my father. I begged him not to. He relented, but said he would keep the letter, and at the first re-offence would no longer be able to keep quiet about my bad behaviour.

  This combination of insolence and diffidence disturbed my parents, confused them, in the same way that my apparent ability at school, which in reality was laziness, made people think that I was a good pupil.

  I went back to class. In an ironic tone the master called me Don Juan. I was hugely flattered, especially since he had mentioned the title of a book that I was familiar with and my classmates weren’t. His “Hello Don Juan” and my knowing smile transformed the class’s view of me. Perhaps they already knew that I had got a boy from one of the lower forms to take a letter to a ‘girl’, as they were known in rough schoolboy parlance. The boy was called Messager; I hadn’t chosen him for his name, but it had made me feel confident all the same.

  At one o’clock I had begged the headmaster not to say anything to my father; by four I was dying to tell him all about it. There was nothing that compelled me to. I put my confession down to candour. Because actually, knowing my father wouldn’t be annoyed, I was delighted that he should learn of my exploit.

  So I confessed, adding proudly that the headmaster had promised me total discretion (as if to a grown-up). My father wondered if I hadn’t concocted the entire romance from start to finish. He went to see the headmaster. During the course of their conversation he mentioned, in an offhand way, what he took to be a practical joke. “What?” said the headmaster, surprised and annoyed. “He told you that? He begged me to not to tell you, saying that you would murder him.”

  This lie by the headmaster excused him; it added to my feelings of manly exhilaration. It earned me the instant respect of the class and winks from the form master. The headmaster hid his ill feelings. Yet the poor man didn’t know what I knew: shocked by his behaviour, my father had decided to let me finish the academic year and then take me away from the school. It was the beginning of June. Not wishing this to have any bearing on my prizes, my laurels, my mother kept quiet about it until after prize-giving. Come the day, as a result of unfairness on the headmaster’s part, who in his confusion feared the consequences of his lie, alone out of my class I received the major prize, which brought with it the award for most outstanding pupil. This was a misjudgement—the school lost its two best pupils, because the prize-winner’s father also took his son away.

  Like decoys, pupils like us attracted others.

  My mother thought I was too young to go to the Lycée Henri IV. In other words—to go by train. So for two years I stayed at home and worked on my own.

  I resolved to have endless enjoyment, since, managing to do in four hours work that my former schoolmates wouldn’t have produced in two days, I was free for more than half the day. I went for walks by myself beside the Marne, which was so much ‘our’ river that when my sisters talked about the Seine they called it ‘a Marne’. I even went in my father’s boat, despite him forbidding it, but I didn’t row, although I wouldn’t admit to myself that I wasn’t scared of disobeying him, simply scared. I would lie in the boat and read. During 1913 and 1914 I got through two hundred books there. None of them were what could be described as bad books; in fact they were the best, if not for the mind then at least for their own merits. Much later on, at the age when adolescence looks down on erotic literature, I acquired a taste for its infantile delights, although at the time I wouldn’t have dreamt of reading it.

  The drawback to this alternating leisure and school work was that it transformed my entire year into an imitation holiday. The amount of work I did each day amounted to very little, but although I worked for shorter periods than the others, I carried on during their holidays, and so this very little was like a piece of cork that a cat has tied to the end of its tail for its whole lifetime, when it would have probably preferred trailing a saucepan around behind it for a month.

  The real holidays were approaching, but since my daily routine went on as usual, this was of little concern to me. The cat was still staring at the cheese under its glass cover. But then War came. It smashed the glass. The masters had other things to worry about and the cat was delighted.

  To be honest, everyone in France was delighted. Prize books tucked under their arms, children crowded round public notices. Bad pupils took advantage of the distress and confusion at home.

  Every day after dinner we went to the railway station at J …, two kilometres from where we lived, to watch the troop trains go past. We took bell-flowers and threw them to the soldiers. Women in overalls poured red wine into cans and sprinkled litres of it over the flower-strewn platform. The memory of the scene still makes me think of a firework display. Never was there so much wasted wine, so many dead flowers. We had to hang flags from all our windows.

  We soon stopped going to J …—my brothers and sisters began to resent the War, they thought it was going on too long. It deprived them of their trips to the seaside. Accustomed to getting up late, they now had to go and buy newspapers at six in the morning. What a miserable sort of amusement! But around the twentieth of August the little monsters regain their hopefulness. Instead of leaving the dinner table where the grown-ups linger, they stay to listen to my father talking about the day of departure. There probably wouldn’t be any transport. So we would have to go a long way by bicycle. My brothers tease my younger sister. The wheels of her bike are barely forty centimetres across: “We’ll leave you behind on the road”. My sister sobs. And what enthusiasm to get the machines cleaned up! Farewell sloth. They offer to repair mine. They get up at dawn to listen to the news. But while everyone else is amazed, I discover the motive behind this patriotism—a journey by bike! All the way to the sea!—a sea that is further away, more attractive than usual. They would have burnt Paris to the ground in order to get away quicker. The thing that was terrifying the whole of Europe had become their one and only hope.

  Is the selfishness of children really so different from our own? During the summer in the country we curse the rain, while the farmers are crying out for it.

  II

  IT IS RARE FOR THERE TO BE A DISASTER WITHOUT warning signs appearing beforehand. The assassination in Austria, the storm over the Caillaux trial, created a suffocating atmosphere conducive to wild behaviour. So my real memories of the War date from before war broke out.

  Here is why.

  My brothers and I used to make fun of one of our neighbours, a ridiculous man, a dwarf with a goatee beard and a hooded raincoat, a town councillor by the name of Maréchaud. Everyone called him Old Man Maréchaud. Although we lived next door we refused to say hello, which made him so livid that one day, unable to stand it any longer, he came up to us in the street and said: “So you don’t greet a town councillor then!” We ran off. After this rudeness, hostilities were opened. But what could a town councillor do to us? On the way to and from school my brothers used to ring his doorbell then run away, emboldened by the knowledge that his dog, which must have been the same age as me, was nothing to be afraid of.

  The day before the fourteenth of July 1914, as I was going to meet my brothers, I was astonished to see people gathered outside the Maréchaud’s front gate. Despite the pruned linden trees, their villa could still be seen at the end of the garden. Since two o’clock that afternoon their young maid, who had gone m
ad, had sought sanctuary up on the roof and was refusing to come down. Horrified by the scandal, the Maréchauds had closed the shutters, which added to the drama of a madwoman on the roof by making it seem as if the house were deserted. People were shouting, infuriated at her employers for not doing something to help the poor soul. She was tottering about on the tiles, although she didn’t seem drunk. I would have liked to stay, but, despatched by my mother, our own maid came to summon us back to work, without which I wouldn’t have been allowed to go to the celebrations. I left with a heavy heart, praying the maid would still be on the roof when I went to meet my father at the station.

  She was still there in the same place, but the few passersby on their way back from Paris were hurrying home for dinner so as not to miss the ball. They only glanced at her for a moment as they walked by.

  In any case, up till now it was still really just a dress rehearsal for the maid. As was customary, she would give her opening performance in the evening, with the festive lamps acting as footlights. There were some in the garden as well as on the main avenue, because, being local worthies, the Maréchauds hadn’t dared not have any illuminations, despite pretending to be away. The eeriness of this house of crime, with a woman with flowing hair walking about on the roof as if on the bridge of a flagship, was heightened by her voice: unearthly, guttural, with a sweetness to it that made your flesh creep.

  Being ‘volunteers’, the members of the fire brigade in a small district were busy with other things apart from manning the pumps all day. After work it was the milkman, the confectioner and the locksmith who put out fires, if they hadn’t already gone out by themselves. After the call-up our firemen also formed a sort of secret militia that did patrols, manoeuvres and night rounds. These gallant fellows eventually appeared and pushed their way through the crowd.