Read Online The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Raymond Radiguet
Ads: Link
basing my nudes on Marthe. I don’t know if my father guessed; he expressed mischievous surprise however, and in a way that made me blush, at the fact that all my models looked the same. So I went back to the Grande-Chaumière and worked hard to put together a collection of drawings for the rest of the year, a collection I would be able to add to when the husband was next home.
I also saw René again, who had been expelled from Henri IV. He was now at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. I met up with him there every evening after finishing at La Grande-Chaumière. We saw each other in secret, because since his expulsion from Henri IV, and especially since Marthe appeared, his parents, who until recently had regarded me as a good example, had forbidden him to mix with me.
René, who thought that love and being in love must be a liability, teased me about my passion for Marthe. Unable to withstand his jibes, like a coward I told him that I wasn’t really in love. His admiration for me, which had been waning of late, instantly grew.
I began to fall asleep at night thinking of Marthe’s love. What tortured me most was the sensual starvation. It was the anxiety of the pianist without a piano, the smoker without cigarettes.
And yet René, who made fun of my affairs of the heart,was smitten with a woman who he thought he liked but wasn’t in love with. This elegant creature, a Spaniard with blond hair, moved like a circus acrobat. René, who feigned indifference, was incredibly jealous of her. Turning pale at the same time as laughing, he begged me to do him a peculiar favour. To anyone who knows schoolboys, it was the archetypal schoolboy idea. He wanted to know if the woman was cheating on him. So what I had to do was make advances to her in order to find out.
This put me in an awkward position. My shyness took hold again. But not for anything in the world would I have wanted to appear shy, and in any case the woman helped me out of my predicament. She was so quick to make overtures to me that shyness, which prevents some things and precipitates others, prevented me from being faithful to either René or Marthe. I was hoping to at least enjoy myself, but I was like the smoker with his one favourite brand. All I was left with were regrets for cheating on René, to whom I swore that his mistress had turned down every advance.
In Marthe’s case I felt no such remorse. But I forced myself to. However much I said that I would never forgive her if she cheated on me, there was nothing I could do about it. “It’s not the same thing,” I said, making excuses for myself with that extraordinary lack of originality that characterizes the ego’s response to everything. Just as I readily conceded that I didn’t write to her, had she not written to me I would have taken it as evidence that she didn’t love me. And yet this minor infidelity strengthened my love.
XIV
JACQUES DIDN’T UNDERSTAND HIS WIFE’S attitude at all. Marthe, who was quite talkative, didn’t say a word to him. If he asked: “What’s the matter?” she would reply: “Nothing.”
Madame Grangier had various altercations with poor Jacques. She accused him of behaving tactlessly towards her daughter, and regretted having let him marry her. She put the sudden changes in her daughter down to this tactlessness of Jacques’s. She thought she ought to come back and live at home. Jacques gave way. A few days after he got back, he took Marthe to her parents’ house, where her mother, by pandering to her slightest whim, unknowingly incited her love for me. Marthe had been born in this house. Every little thing, she told Jacques, reminded her of the happy times when she had belonged here. She was going to sleep in the room she had had as a girl. Jacques asked if a bed could at least be set up for him in there. This caused a fit of hysterics. Marthe refused to sully her maidenly room.
Monsieur Grangier found this prudery of hers ridiculous. Madame Grangier used it as an
I also saw René again, who had been expelled from Henri IV. He was now at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. I met up with him there every evening after finishing at La Grande-Chaumière. We saw each other in secret, because since his expulsion from Henri IV, and especially since Marthe appeared, his parents, who until recently had regarded me as a good example, had forbidden him to mix with me.
René, who thought that love and being in love must be a liability, teased me about my passion for Marthe. Unable to withstand his jibes, like a coward I told him that I wasn’t really in love. His admiration for me, which had been waning of late, instantly grew.
I began to fall asleep at night thinking of Marthe’s love. What tortured me most was the sensual starvation. It was the anxiety of the pianist without a piano, the smoker without cigarettes.
And yet René, who made fun of my affairs of the heart,was smitten with a woman who he thought he liked but wasn’t in love with. This elegant creature, a Spaniard with blond hair, moved like a circus acrobat. René, who feigned indifference, was incredibly jealous of her. Turning pale at the same time as laughing, he begged me to do him a peculiar favour. To anyone who knows schoolboys, it was the archetypal schoolboy idea. He wanted to know if the woman was cheating on him. So what I had to do was make advances to her in order to find out.
This put me in an awkward position. My shyness took hold again. But not for anything in the world would I have wanted to appear shy, and in any case the woman helped me out of my predicament. She was so quick to make overtures to me that shyness, which prevents some things and precipitates others, prevented me from being faithful to either René or Marthe. I was hoping to at least enjoy myself, but I was like the smoker with his one favourite brand. All I was left with were regrets for cheating on René, to whom I swore that his mistress had turned down every advance.
In Marthe’s case I felt no such remorse. But I forced myself to. However much I said that I would never forgive her if she cheated on me, there was nothing I could do about it. “It’s not the same thing,” I said, making excuses for myself with that extraordinary lack of originality that characterizes the ego’s response to everything. Just as I readily conceded that I didn’t write to her, had she not written to me I would have taken it as evidence that she didn’t love me. And yet this minor infidelity strengthened my love.
XIV
JACQUES DIDN’T UNDERSTAND HIS WIFE’S attitude at all. Marthe, who was quite talkative, didn’t say a word to him. If he asked: “What’s the matter?” she would reply: “Nothing.”
Madame Grangier had various altercations with poor Jacques. She accused him of behaving tactlessly towards her daughter, and regretted having let him marry her. She put the sudden changes in her daughter down to this tactlessness of Jacques’s. She thought she ought to come back and live at home. Jacques gave way. A few days after he got back, he took Marthe to her parents’ house, where her mother, by pandering to her slightest whim, unknowingly incited her love for me. Marthe had been born in this house. Every little thing, she told Jacques, reminded her of the happy times when she had belonged here. She was going to sleep in the room she had had as a girl. Jacques asked if a bed could at least be set up for him in there. This caused a fit of hysterics. Marthe refused to sully her maidenly room.
Monsieur Grangier found this prudery of hers ridiculous. Madame Grangier used it as an
Similar Books
