The Devil in the Flesh
SynopsisPlot
The narrator, a boy of 16, tells of his love affair with Martha Lacombe, a young woman whose soldier husband is away at the front. With an accuracy of insight that is almost ruthless, he describes his conflicting emotions—the pride of an adolescent on the verge of manhood and the pain of a child thrust too fast into maturity. The liaison soon becomes a scandal, and their friends, horrified and incredulous, refuse to accept what is happening—even when the affair reaches its tragic climax.
Story
About this book
The novel unfolds in Paris during the closing year of the First World War. Its narrator, a sixteen-year-old boy, recounts his relationship with Martha Lacombe, a young married woman whose husband is serving at the front. Around them, daily life continues under wartime conditions, with absences, delayed letters, and a loosened sense of routine that gives the boy unusual freedom.
The telling is unusually exact about the narrator's own motives. He records the pride of a boy who feels he is becoming a man, alongside the strain of handling adult attachments he cannot yet control. His self-examination is often unflattering. As the affair becomes visible, friends and neighbours react with disbelief, and the pressure of opinion tightens around the couple.
Radiguet began the book at sixteen and completed it at eighteen, drawing on his own adolescent attachment to an older woman. It appeared in 1923, the same year that typhoid fever ended his life at twenty. The narrow gap between the events described and the writing itself is part of what keeps the voice so close to its subject.
