"Count d'Orgel's Ball" by Raymond Radiguet (review)

Count d'Orgel's Ball by Raymond Radiguet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Count d’Orgel’s Ball" is a short novel published in 1924, the year after its author, the Parisian literary prodigy Raymond Radiguet, had been killed by typhus at the age of only twenty. It is a delicious love story, a story of unspoken and unconsummated love with a wide open ending, concise and in the true classical French tradition. Also very “French” is its ruthlessly analytical character, as for example in the early 19th c. tale Adolphe by Constant. Radiguet’s novel directly imitated the classical style typical of the novels by Madame de La Fayette (The Princess of Cleves) and Choderlos de Laclos (Dangerous Liaisons) and is completely different from the style of his era.

The story, a love triangle between a woman (the gorgeous Mahaut) and two men (her husband, the Comte Anne d’Orgel, and their mutual friend François), takes place in Paris around 1920 in the milieu of members of the declining hereditary nobility, Russian emigrants, diplomats and various upstarts. From the moment that François starts visiting the D’Orgels, a complicated psychological game begins. François becomes completely obsessed by Mahaut, but he does not dare express his love and shrouds himself in his tormented feelings. Mahaut flirts more and more openly with François, often in a way in which the eroticism is increasingly revealed, but draws the line at becoming unfaithful to her husband. And that husband, as said above, only sees everything as a game, which reveals the emptiness and decadence in the life of the post-war nobility, continuously searching for new sensations, but without having any deep feelings.

Radiguet was a protege of Cocteau, who took care of the posthumous publication of this wonderful novel in a bibliophile edition. Radiguet was closely connected with the artistic bohemian circles of Montmartre and Montparnasse of the 1920s, including Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Max Jacob.

Radiguet was one of the favorite authors of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who especially admired Count Orgel for its elegant style. Mishma even called it “the Bible of his youth” and among his early short stories is one about the death of Radiguet and his relation with Cocteau; he also wrote several essays about Radiguet. It is also a common trend in Japanese culture to admire those who died young and pure with unfulfilled genius – as noted above, Radiguet was only twenty when he left this world. Finally, Mishima was fond of stories set in the milieu of the aristocracy – he wrote several himself, most notably Spring Snow, the first novel of his final tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. Radiguet exerted a seminal influence over the Japanese writer.


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