A French Cameo

COUNT D'ORGEL (214 pp.)--Raymond Kadiguet--Grove Press ($3).

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."

Raymond spent the summer of his twelfth year in a boat on the Marne, reading his father's library of modern French authors, and decided to become a writer. At 14, he was producing lyric poetry of mature feeling and craft. At 15, he hit out on his own in the literary life of Paris. At 17, he brought out his first volume of poetry and wrote his first novel. Le Diable an Corps (recently made into a French film and shown in the U.S. as Devil in the Flesh), the story of an adolescent love affair.

The critics got the dithers. "We are in the presence of a boy," wrote one, "possessing a creative confidence, a mental perfection and a rigor of expression belonging to the most accomplished and the most experienced, an artist who has given up all the illusions of youth." The esthetes rolled their eyes. "He dominated us all," says Jean Cocteau, "by his wisdom, his calm, and the clairvoyance of his myopic eyes turned inward."

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."

A Lineal Prig. The lovers of the story are Franc,ois de Seryeuse, a young Frenchman of good family, and Mahaut, Countess d'Orgel, descended from the old Creole nobility of Martinique, the wife of the Count d'Orgel. When the story begins after World War I, Mahaut is scarcely more than a child and is deeply in love with her husband, a man of 30; "in return, [the count] showed her much gratitude and the warmest friendship, which he himself mistook for love."

The Count d'Orgel, in fact, was a lineal prig, living & breathing for social ritual The Orgels met Franc,ois de Seryeuse at the circus one night and invited him to lunch. Soon he and Mahaut were talking about their childhood lives in the country. Franc,ois words refreshed her like a gift of wild flowers."

In a little while, Franc,ois was in love with Mahaut, but the count, though perhaps he sensed it, was not disturbed. If anything, it increased his friendship for Franc,ois. "The reason was in fact incredible ... We are drawn toward those who flatter us, in whatever way." Franc,ois, for his part, admired the count. "His admiration was above all for a man capable of being loved by a Mahaut." Furthermore, Orgel began to love his wife from the moment he saw that Franc,ois loved her, as though he needed the evidence of another man's desire to teach him her value." Mahaut least of all was aware of what was toward. "She behaved like children who . . . think if one shuts one's eyes and does not move, one is dead."

A Watteau of the Heart. The three drift gently down the garden path of self-deception in a bee-hum of amorous unrest then all at once Mahaut is stung to consciousness. With the realization that she loves Franc,ois, she begs him to stay away. When he continues his visits anyway she confesses to her husband and begs him to save her. To her amazement, the count is not so much disturbed by her news as by the fact that she has shared it with Franc,ois' mother. "It is absurd," he says We must find means of putting everything right . . . Franc,ois must take part in our opening scene [at a masque they have planned]. You must choose his costume " As Mahaut looks at her husband, she sees nim at last for what he is.

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 of his art, in which he is a cameoist of sensibilities, a Watteau of the heart.

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