The Devil in the Flesh

The tragic and complicated French romance about a teenage boy who seduces the wife of a soldier during World War I—and one of the most startling literary debuts of all time

A Penguin Classic

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman who is married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river banks. When she receives letters from her husband, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends and neighbours. Instead, they can only hurtle towards tragedy.

Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, and loosely based on his life, The Devil in the Flesh became an instant bestseller and its author was hailed as a genius, before dying tragically at the age of twenty. It is a work of startling imagery and subtle beauty about power, betrayal, and passion that expresses all the anguish and joy of adolescence.“There is no doubt that [Radiguet has] a remarkable intuitive knowledge of human emotions and a still more remarkable style.” 
—The New York Times

“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.” 
—François Mauriac

“Passages of delirious sensuality . . . so assured that one wonders how he would have written in maturity.” 
—The Guardian

“A masterpiece.” 
—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 WeldonRaymond Radiguet (1903–1923) was born near Paris. He dropped out of high school in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature, and associated himself with the Modernist set, befriending Picasso, Max Jacob, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris, and especially Jean Cocteau, who became his mentor. His first novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh), was published in 1923 and became a runaway bestseller in France. Radiguet died of typhoid fever the same year, at the age of twenty. His second novel, Le bal du Comte d'Orgel (Count d'Orgel's Ball) was published posthumously in 1924.