Book description
François, the adolescent narrator, meets Marthe at the start of
the First World War. While her husband is away at the Front, they fall
deeply in love Â- with tragic consequences. Set in wartime and
post-war Paris, The Devil in the Flesh debates the ever-contemporary
battle between individual freedom and convention, passion and honour.
Written when the author was still a teenager, and following his own
love-affair with a married woman, the novel was considered highly
scandalous upon its publication in 1923.
In his short life, RAYMOND RADIGUET (1903-1923) wrote only two short,
but celebrated, novels and one volume of poetry. Radiguet entered
Parisian literary and artistic circles when he left school, and became
friends with many of the major figures of European modernism. His only
other novel is Count d'Orgel, also available from Pushkin Press, which
was first published posthumously by Jean Cocteau in 1924, after
Radiguet's death of typhoid fever at the age of twenty.
