The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet Read Free Book Online Page A

her room. Then I stopped, again feeling a desire to run away. Marthe might never forgive me. Or maybe I was about to discover that she was cheating on me, and find her with another man!
    “Marthe?” I whispered.
    She replied:
    “Instead of giving me such a fright, you might just as well have come in the morning. So you got leave a week early then?”
    She thought I was Jacques!
    If I had now seen the way she would have greeted him, at the same time I discovered that she was concealing something from me. Jacques was due back in a week’s time!
    I switched on the light. She was still facing the wall. The simplest thing would have been to say: “It’s me,” and yet I didn’t. I just kissed her on the neck.
    “Your face is wet. Do dry it.”
    Then she turned round and gave a cry.
    In the space of a second her whole manner changed and, not bothering to ask what I was doing there in the middle of the night, she said:
    “But my poor darling, you’ll catch your death of cold! Quick, take your clothes off.”
    She hurried off to rekindle the fire in the drawing room. When she came back to the bedroom, seeing me still standing there, she asked:
    “Do you want me to help you?”
    As someone who dreaded more than anything the moment when I would have to undress, and could visualize how ridiculous I would look, I was eternally grateful to the rain, thanks to which getting undressed now took on a motherly aspect. Meanwhile Marthe went back and forth to the kitchen to see if the water for my hot toddy had boiled. Finally she found me lying naked on the bed, half-hidden by the quilt. She told me off—it was crazy not to wear any clothes; I ought to rub myself down with eau de cologne.
    Then she opened a wardrobe and tossed me some pyjamas. They ought to be ‘my size’. A pair of Jacques’s! And I remembered that it was quite likely the soldier would arrive, since Marthe had thought it was him.
    I got into bed. Marthe joined me. I asked her to put the light out. For even in her arms I was still wary of my shyness. Darkness made me feel brave. Marthe replied softly:
    “No. I want to watch you fall asleep.”
    These words, so charming, made me feel self-conscious. In them I found the touching sweetness of a woman who was risking everything to be my mistress, and, unable to imagine my pathological shyness, accepted that I should go to sleep beside her. For four months I had been saying I loved her, yet didn’t give her that proof which men are so lavish with, and which for them often takes the place of love. I switched the light out myself.
    I experienced the same agitation that I had felt earlier, before I came into the apartment. But like my wait outside the door, the one outside the doors of love couldn’t possibly last for long. Besides, my imagination had been promising itself such exquisite sensual delights that it was no longer able to picture them. And for the first time I was afraid of being like her husband, leaving her with bad memories of our first moments of love.
    So her happiness was greater than mine. But as soon as we were unentwined, the look in her wonderful eyes made all my discomfort seem worthwhile.
    Her face was transfigured. I was amazed not to be able to even touch the halo that surrounded it, like in religious paintings.
    My fears were allayed, but there were more to come.
    Finally comprehending the power of acts that shyness hadn’t dared allow me to perform until now, I was terrified that Marthe might belong to her husband in more ways than she cared to admit.
    But since I’m not capable of understanding things that I’m trying for the first time, I had to get acquainted with the delights of love day-by-day.
    In the meantime this counterfeit pleasure caused me real pain—the one that men feel—jealousy.
    I resented Marthe, because from the grateful expression on her face I realised what fleshly ties really mean. I cursed the man who had roused her body before I had. I reflected on how foolish