The Devil in the Flesh
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.
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