Word: radiguet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Count d'Orgel, by Raymond Radiguet. Three people locked in a triangle of sensibilities; a minor masterpiece by a French literary prodigy who died at 20 (TIME, March...
...Raymond Radiguet, whose masterpiece, Count d'Orgel, is published this week in the U.S., was a literary prodigy. He was born near Paris in 1903, one of a large tribe of children sired by a cartoonist for the Paris comic magazine Le Rire. Of his mother Radiguet once said: "I don't know very well what her face looked like. She was always tying shoelaces...
After Le Diable, Radiguet began to study the most famous of the French courtly novels, The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette (TIME, May 28, 1951), and was inspired to write Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel. "A chaste love story"-he called it-"as shocking as the least chaste...
Precisely at this point, the book ends; and with the book, Radiguet's life ended too. He received the proofs as he lay dying of typhoid fever. "Listen," he said. Listen to something terrible. In three days I am going to be shot by the soldiers God. . . I heard the order." Three days later, Raymond Radiguet died. He was 20. Age is nothing," he had written. "All great poets have written at seventeen. The greatest are those who succeed in making one forget it." Radiguet can make a reader forget everything but the cool grace...
Some of the most striking French fiction comes from precocious teenagers writing about teenagers. In Devil in the Flesh, 17-year-old Raymond Radiguet showed a boy drawn into a love affair with an older married woman and swamped by the first rush of passion. In Awakening, Jean-Baptiste Rossi, 16, told a startling but sensitive story of a love affair between a youngster and a Roman Catholic nun. In The Illusionist (written three years ago) 22-year-old Françoise Mallet, a Parisian housewife and mother, tells perhaps the strangest tale of all, that of a 15-year...