Read Online The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet - Free Book Online

afternoon I didn’t dare tell Marthe. Besides, this one incident on its own wouldn’t have compromised her reputation. That had long been a given. Well before itactually happened, rumours were already circulating that she was my mistress. We hadn’t been aware of anything. But all was about to be revealed. One day I arrived to find her utterly drained. The landlord had just told her that for the last four days he had been watching out for me as I left at dawn. He had refused to believe it at first, but was no longer in any doubt. The elderly couple whose room was below Marthe’s were complaining about the noise we made night and day. Marthe was shaken; she wanted to leave. It didn’t occur to us to behave more discreetly when we were together. It was something we didn’t feel capable of doing—anyway we had already been found out. It was then that Marthe began to understand a number of things that had surprised her. Her only real female friend, a young Swedish girl, wasn’t replying to her letters. I found out that the girl’s guardian had seen us embracing on the train, and had advised her not to have anything more to do with Marthe.
    I made her promise that if a dramatic row or something similar were to blow up, whether with her parents or her husband, then she wouldn’t back down. The landlord’s threats, a few rumours, gave me every reason to both fear and hope that there would be a confrontation between Marthe and Jacques.
    Marthe begged me to come and see her often while Jacques was home on leave, having already talked to him about me. I refused, afraid of not playing my part well enough, as well as of seeing another man fussing around her. His leave was for eleven days. He might cheat the system and find a way of staying an extra two. I made her promise to write to me every day. I waited for three days before going to the
poste restante
, to be certain of therebeing a letter. There were already four. But I couldn’t take them—I didn’t have one of the required proofs of identity. I was all the more nervous, having forged my birth certificate, because you had to be eighteen to use the
poste restante
. In an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the young woman behind the counter, I insisted on having the letters that she was keeping back and wouldn’t give me. In the end, since they knew me at the post office, I persuaded them to at least send them on to my home address.
    It was clear that I still had a long way to go before becoming a man. As I opened the first of Marthe’s letters, I wondered how she would accomplish this amazing feat—writing a love letter. But I was forgetting that there is no easier letter to write—all it takes is love. I thought Marthe’s were wonderful, comparable with the most beautiful ones I had read. And yet she talked about perfectly ordinary things, what agony it was to be so far away from me.
    It surprised me not to be more consumed with jealousy. I began to see Jacques as ‘the husband’. I gradually forgot how young he was, I pictured him as an old greybeard.
    I didn’t write back to Marthe; all things considered it was too risky. Deep down I was glad to be prevented from doing so, having, as always when faced with anything new, an ill-defined fear of not being capable, or that my letters might shock her or seem naive.
    Such was my carelessness that after two days, having left one of Marthe’s letters lying around on my desk, it disappeared; it reappeared the next day. Finding it upset my plans—I had taken advantage of Jacques’s leave and my being at home for long periods to make my family believethat I was growing away from Marthe. For if initially I had bragged, keen that my parents should know I had a mistress, I was now beginning to wish there was less for them to know. Which was the moment my father discovered the real reason for my good behaviour.
    I made the most of my free time to start going to art school again; because for some time I had been