Raymond Radiguet
(1903 - 1923) France
Writer and actor
When Raymond Radiguet met Cocteau, was 14 year-old, exactly half of the age of Cocteau. He was still an adolscent, though of absolute genius. He was hard and of a brutal force, alternately passionate and indifferent, as Cocteau said, it needed "a diamond to scratch his heart."
 He was divinely made to make the maximum impact on the impressionable Cocteau. The creative influence was reciprocal: Cocteau wrote some of his best works from him, and Radiguet two classics before he diet at only twenty.
His first book, Le diable au corps (1923), has for subject the perversity of the adolescent in love, an extraordinbary mixture of perception and brutality, tenderness and heartlessness. Then came his poem Les joues en feu (1923) and his posthumous Le bal du Comte d'Orgel (1924), a real masterpiece.
They were lovers for only six years, because Radiguet died of typhoid fever, having already undermined his constitution by heavy drinking.
|
