Count D’Orgel’s Ball, a less satisfying and complete novel than the first, reflected the company in which Radiguet found himself following his overnight success. He is thought to have based the character of Count Anne D’Orgel loosely upon Comte Étienne de Beaumont, who was famous for his lavish Mardi Gras celebrations, one of which Radiguet attended dressed in a “shooting gallery” costume designed by Picasso. In the book, D’Orgel and his wife Mahaut host a grand, post-war ball, attended by royals, diplomats, and hangers-on. Some attend for the “slander”, others for the “distraction”, among the latter, Mahaut herself. The ball becomes a stage upon which her stifling marriage to the Count is played out. Although the Comtesse Edith de Beaumont is said to have fallen asleep when Radiguet gave a reading of some of his earlier work, she and her husband seem to have taken his second novel in good humour.

Indeed, with Count D’Orgel’s Ball, Radiguet honed his skills as a satirist. The jokes were not always at the expense of the wealthy and privileged, but at that of unwitting outsiders. Mahaut d’Orgel’s mother, who came from Martinique, “developed a nervous disorder which turned her into a typical Creole, spending her life on a sofa”. It was an affectionate observation which Radiguet could justify, as the son of a “typical Creole” mother himself. Count d’Orgel, meanwhile, “was only expert at expressing what he did not feel”.

Radiguet’s interest in these characters was historical rather than sycophantic. It was his belief that families such as the de Beaumonts could trace their heritage back to a time when life was meaningful and profound, as opposed to merely frivolous, that fascinated him more than their wealth and circumstance. He took inspiration for the novel from the 17th-century classic La Princesse de Clèves, which is usually attributed to Madame de La Fayette. Set at the court of Henry II of France in the late 1550s, La Princesse was a story of forbidden yearning and self-enforced chastity. Where these themes are revived in Count D’Orgel’s Ball, the characters are too whimsical to be worthy of their agonies.

The novel was first published in two instalments in La Nouvelle Revue Française, six months after Radiguet died. He had revised it while holidaying in Le Piquey, near Bordeaux, which is where he is believed to have contracted typhoid. Upon his return to Paris, he was nursed by Bronia Perlmutter, a Polish life model whom he had taken as a lover, but it was too late. By the time the doctor diagnosed typhoid, Radiguet was failing. “In three days I shall be shot by the soldiers of God,” he told Cocteau, “I heard the order.” He was right.

On December 12, 1923, Radiguet died. Among the hundreds who attended his funeral were Picasso and Brancusi, but not Cocteau. His influence on Radiguet had been formative, but more literal than literary. Since giving Radiguet’s work its first audience, he had felt superfluous to his needs, an impediment even, to the isolation of his prose. Radiguet, one feels, would have forgiven Cocteau his absence. The last thing he needed was a long, quivering shadow cast across his corpse.