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Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923) entered Parisian literary society with a bang when The Devil in the Flesh was published. Only eighteen at the time, he became the star of an unprecedented publicity campaign and earned copious praise and censure for his precocious talent and scandalous behaviour - the more so as the novel was based on his own wartime affair with a soldier's wife. A protégé and perhaps lover of Jean Cocteau, he fraternized with artists, dancers and aristocrats, drank heavily, and generally ran riot, before settling down for a brief period, during which he wrote one more novel, Count d'Orgel, also published by Pushkin Press. Shortly after the manuscript was completed, he contracted typhoid fever and died within a few weeks, aged only twenty. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
A triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece * New Statesman * Passages of delirious sensuality... The Devil in the Flesh is so assured that one wonders how [Radiguet] would have written in maturity * Guardian * The Devil In The Flesh, a masterpiece of promise... [Radiguet] belonged to the solemn race of men whose lives unfold too quickly to their close -- Jean Cocteau This young prodigy of a French writer was so shrewd, so ruthless, glittering and clever, so full of dawning marvel at the ways of the world, so freshly observant, that every page he wrote was a delight -- Fay Weldon 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... One of the measures of the book's brilliance is that its morality, or its amorality, is not clear-cut... A century on, this novella still has the power to unsettle -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian * He could drag himself from pub to pub, get no sleep for whole nights, wander from one hotel room to another – his spirit worked with a constant lucidity, with a wonderful and sound logic -- Joseph Kessel
