The ultimate, the original enfant terrible and muse to Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet published this roman a clef when he was still a teenager. His hero in the book (unnamed) is fifteen years old when he seduces nineteen-year-old Marthe. Marthe is engaged to a soldier on the Front (this is the last year or so of World War I), and the protagonist lets the marriage go ahead. But as soon as Jacques is back on the front line our 'hero' is spending his nights and much of his days at the marital home. Marthe loves him dearly. He is too young for such considerations. For him, it is all about the coup, the exercise of control over a lesser being. The book came out in 1923, around the time Radiguet turned twenty. It was a scandal and a sensation. Of course everyone assumed it was autobiographical, which it may well have been; of course Radiguet did nothing to clear up the matter. The outcry was not so much the seduction as the implication that the wives of France's heroes might not have been entirely faithful during their long absence.
Radiguet wrote a play and one more novel - Count Orgel's Ball, which is much harder to get hold of. He was still only twenty when he died in December 1923. Cocteau was inconsolable - for a while. Nina Hamnett (see below), who knew them both from Bohemian nights at the Boeuf sur le toit, attended the funeral.
The book remains extraordinarily powerful. The translation in the Penguin Classic version, by A M Sheridan Smith, is extremely readable.
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