The Devil in the Book

In the early 1920s a slim, sensitive novel of egotistic passion called Le Diable au Corps electrified French literary circles. Hailed as a minor masterpiece, the book was translated into nine languages, sold close to 3,000,000 copies, and earned for its precocious author, 20-year-old Raymond Radiguet, a secure place in French literature. Like many another convincingly told work of fiction, Radiguet's novel set many readers wondering how much of fiction was really fact. Nowhere did such speculation reach greater heights than in the Marne River town of Saint-Maur, where Radiguet had lived as a boy.

In his book, young Radiguet told the story of an adolescent schoolboy in World War I who had fallen in love with a woman three years his senior whose husband was away at the front. The townsfolk of Saint-Maur, reading the story of illicit passion, remembered that the young author himself had been seen often in the company of a local schoolteacher named Alice, a married woman some years older.

The Way of Tongues. There were no grounds during the war for supposing that Alice's relations with her 14-year-old protege were more than those of a dedicated teacher and a pupil in whom she recognized the spark of genius. But smalltown tongues wag easily, and Saint-Maur's gossips, titillated by frequent glimpses of Alice and Raymond strolling in deep communion by the river's edge, let their speculation run free. When Alice's poilu husband Gaston came back from the war a hero, the cheers that greeted him were mingled with many a knowing snicker, snickers directed both at him and at the baby boy his wife bore him.

There was reason enough for the child, for Gaston had been able to visit his wife on furlough. But the doubts that the villagers implanted refused to vanish. When Raymond's book appeared, with its story of an adolescent who had got his older mistress with child shortly before her husband's return, Gaston's uncertainty became an incubus. He sent his son away and refused to have anything more to do with the child. Sensitive to every look askance in the village streets, he took his wife to another town and after that to still another.

A Lifetime Late. Driven to distraction, Alice did her best to dispel her husband's doubts, but the only man who might have provided positive evidence to support her case was gone. Less than six months after the publication of his book, Raymond Radiguet died. Alice found evidence that the young author had stolen a diary in which she had described many an intimate scene with her husband, and used it to give his book verisimilitude. Gaston was not convinced. Time and again, he would cite a passage from Devil in the Flesh and confront his wife with it. "No," she would cry, "it is not true! The boy was only a child." Then, for a while, her husband would believe, and the couple would find an evanescent moment of happiness--only to lose it again in a new surge of distrust.

So they lived for nearly a quarter of a century, patching a life of torment into a counterfeit of happiness. Then, after World War II, the film version of Devil in the Flesh appeared, and all the old wounds were ripped open once again. Five years later, in 1952, Alice died. "Everything they wrote about us was untrue," she whispered to her husband as death approached. "I did nothing wrong." Already old in his late 50s, his spirit corroded by doubt, his neglected son a crippled invalid in the care of strangers, Gaston gazed at his dying wife and for the first time believed her, a lifetime too late. Last month Gaston died of leukemia.

Last week, piecing together the evidence he left behind, the French intellectual weekly, Figaro Litteraire, told the full story of his blighted life. "When you receive this," Gaston had written a friend, "I will have joined her whom I loved and who always loved me. I hope that this novel which caused us so much evil will be forgotten in obscurity."

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