Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

“Count d’Orgel’s Ball” came out scarcely a few months after its author, Raymond Radiguet, died at the age of 20 in 1923. Edited by Jean Cocteau, his lover, Radiguet’s second novel was an instant success. His first novel, published when he was only 16, draws from his own teenage love affair with a married woman whose husband was away fighting the Germans in the trenches. That too had been an instant success. “Count d’Orgel’s Ball,” far tamer, is the story of the platonic love of a young man for a young married woman, who, like the Princess de Cleves of the eponymous 17th century novel, is equally in love with him. Their love is chaste, and everyone’s bashful, and scruples spin about each like light from a ballroom sphere; but in the minefield of the human heart, it is shame, not lovesickness, that knows exactly where to hurt.

Neither he nor she ever speaks of their love to each other but, one night, at the end of the novel, the wife does tell her husband of her guilty crush for the young bachelor. The urbane, world-wise husband would like nothing better than to dismiss the whole affair and blame her overstrained nerves. He orders her to go to sleep and promises to discuss the matter with her in the morning. But the reader knows--and the spouses know it too--they won’t.

With the exception of Proust, no author in the 20th century had cut into the insidious mechanisms of the human heart with so unsparing or so wicked a scalpel as Radiguet. His clipped sentences unsaddle all of our soulful high-minded stirrings. No one is acquitted; and everyone, as in every good French tale from “Les Liaisons dangereuses” to “Claire’s Knee,” turns out to be an accomplished liar. Some may be reluctant to lie to others, but no one thinks twice about lying to himself. As we all know but never wish to admit, the true seat of love is not desire; it is repression.