Victor Hugo’s great grandson Jean invites a few friends over to his Paris apartment for a seance party; the occult is newly en vogue with Dadaist and Cubist circles of the early 1920s. Radiguet, who has just published his first novel The Devil in the Flesh at 20-years-old, is among the invitees, accompanied by his mentor Cocteau and composer Georges Auric. As myth goes, the spirit summoned had a message for the provocative young writer, “Uneasiness will grow with genius...Fame does not replace love even in death and I am death. I want his youth.”
Hailed as a prodigy who had dropped out of high school and came from simple means, Radiguet scandalized a fairly eclectic group of artists with immediate displays of opulent spending and trysts with various women (allegedly Picasso’s mistress and Modigliani’s muse). Affectionately or enviously they dubbed him ‘Monsieur Bébé.’ It didn’t help matters that the loosely autobiographical Devil in the Flesh, written in first person, was the story of a young boy’s illicit affair with a high society married woman while clueless husband fights in the trenches of World War I. “He knows how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil,” Hemingway taunted.
“People who reproach me should try and imagine what the War was for so many young boys – a four year long holiday,” the novel’s protagonist begins. “Much later on, at the age when adolescence looks down on erotic literature, I acquired a taste for its infantile delights.” Radiguet’s precocious ferocity is apparent within several pages of the text and Cocteau asserts his artistry “lovelier than Proust and truer than Balzac.”
The spirit summoned months prior, imaginary or not, would forecast Radiguet’s permanent immurement in youth. At 21 he succumbed to typhoid fever, likely from bad oysters, while on holiday in coastal village Le Piquey. “In three days I shall be shot by the soldiers of God,” he told Cocteau on his sick bed. Coco Chanel made arrangements for flowers, horses and hearse in white, as was customary for children’s funerals at the time. All of Cocteau’s life, Radiguet would be a source of inspiration for plays and films on love, mortality, and the purity of poetic vision.
-Katie Calderon