The Lemoine Affair (3 page)

I do not like the diamond at all. I see no beauty in it. The little beauty it adds
to that of human faces is less an effect of its own than a reflection of theirs. It
has neither the ocean clarity of the emerald, nor the unbounded azure of the sapphire.
I prefer the smoky glint of the topaz to it, and above all the twilight charm of opals.
They are emblematic and twofold. If moonlight makes half of their face iridescent,
the other seems tinged by the pink and green glints of sunset. We are not so much
amused by the colors it presents to us, as we are touched by the dreams it conjures
up. To one who can encounter nothing beyond himself except the form of his own fate,
they show an alternative and taciturn face.

There were many of them in the city where Hermas took me. The house we lived in was
valuable more from the beauty of the site than from the comfort of the beings in it.
The perspective of horizons was more carefully managed there than the furnishing of
the premises was planned. It was more pleasant to daydream there than it was to sleep.
It was more picturesque than comfortable. Overwhelmed by the heat during the day,
the peacocks made their fateful, mocking cries heard all night long—cries that are,
to tell the truth, more suitable for daydreaming than favorable to sleep. The sound
of the bells kept one from finding sleep during the morning, failing the sleep that
one can only really enjoy before daylight—though the later sleep at least makes up
to a certain extent for the fatigue from having been completely deprived of the earlier.
The majesty of the ceremonies whose hours their chimes announced was a poor recompense
for the annoyance of being awakened at an hour when one is supposed to be asleep,
if one wishes to be able, later on, to profit from the ensuing hours. The sole recourse
then was to quit the cloth of the sheets and the feather of the pillow and go walk
through the house. This undertaking, to tell the truth, although it had some charm,
also presented danger. It was amusing without ceasing to be perilous. One would rather
give up the pleasure of it than pursue the adventure. The parquet tiles that M. de
Séryeuse had brought back from the islands were many-colored and disjointed, slippery
and geometric. Their mosaic was brilliant and erratic. The pattern of its lozenges,
now red, now black, offered to the gaze a more pleasing spectacle than the wooden
floor—raised here, broken there—promised the step a sure gait.

The appeal of the walk one could have in the courtyard was not won by so many risks.
One would go down into it around noon. The sun warmed the pavement, or the rain dripped
from the rooftops. Sometimes wind made the weathervane creak. In front of the closed
gate, monumental and covered with verdigris, a sculpted Hermes gave the shadow he
projected the form of his caduceus. Dead leaves from nearby trees fell, swirling up
to his heels, and folded onto the marble wings their wings of gold. Votive and potbellied,
doves came to perch in the alcoves of the archivolt or on the splay of the pedestal,
and often let fall a drab ball, flaky and gray. It splattered its intermittent, grainy
mass on the gravel or on the grass, and, sticky with the grass it once had been, covered
the grass abounding on the lawn and filling the footpath of what M. de Séryeuse called
his garden.

Lemoine came often to stroll about there.

That is where I saw him for the first time. He seemed to be more aptly fitted in a
lackey’s smock than clad in a doctor’s cap. The rogue claimed to be a doctor, though,
in several sciences wherein it is more profitable to succeed than to which it is often
prudent to devote oneself.

It was noon when his coach arrived, describing a circle in front of the steps. The
pavement resounded with the team’s hooves; a valet ran up to pull down the
folding step. In the street, women crossed themselves. The north wind blew. At the
foot of the marble Hermes, the caducean shadow had taken on an elusive and shifty
aspect. Pursued by the wind, it seemed to be laughing. Bells rang out. Between the
bronze volleys of a great bell, a peal of smaller bells, out of time with each other,
hazarded their crystal choreography. In the garden, a swing creaked. Dry seeds lay
on top of the sundial. The sun shone and disappeared by turns. Agatized by its light,
the Hermes of the threshold became darker from the sun’s obscuring than he would have
been from its absence. Successive and ambiguous, the marmoreal face lived. A smile
seemed to lengthen expiatory lips into the shape of a caduceus. The smell of willow,
of pumice, of cineraria and marquetry escaped from the closed shutters of the office
and from the half-open door of the vestibule. It made the dullness of the hour heavier.
M. de Séryeuse and Lemoine continued to chat on the steps. One could hear an equivocal,
shrill sound like a burst of furtive laughter. This was the gentleman’s sword, which
clinked against the glass alchemical retort. The feathered hat of the one safeguarded
him better from the wind than the silken nightcap of the other. Lemoine had a cold.
From his nose, which he forgot to wipe, a little mucus had fallen onto his shirtfront
and onto his suit. Its viscous, warm core had slipped down the linen of one, but had
adhered to the cloth of the other, and held the silvery, fluent fringe that dripped
from it in suspense above the void. The sun, piercing them, confused the sticky mucus
with the diluted
solution. One could make out just the one single succulent, quivering mass, transparent
and hardening; and in the ephemeral brilliance with which it decorated Lemoine’s attire,
it seemed to have fixed the prestige of a momentary diamond there, still hot, so to
speak, from the oven from which it had emerged, and for which this unstable jelly,
corrosive and alive as it was for one more instant, seemed at once, by its deceitful,
fascinating beauty, to present both a mockery and a symbol.

21 December 1907
.

Dined with Lucien Daudet, who spoke with a touch of mocking gusto about the fabulous
diamonds seen on the shoulders of Mme X …, diamonds being pronounced by Lucien in
extremely fine language, upon my word, with an ever-artistic notation, with the savory
spelling out of his epithets marking the wholly superior writer, as being despite
everything a bourgeois stone, a little silly, not at all comparable, for instance,
to the emerald or the ruby. And over dessert, Lucien let drop that Lefebvre de Béhaine
had told him, Lucien, that evening, contrary to the opinion of the charming woman
Mme de Nadaillac, that a certain Lemoine has discovered the secret
of making diamonds. This would create, in the business world, according to Lucien,
a furious commotion faced with the possible depreciation of still unsold diamond stocks,
a commotion that could well end up reaching the judicial authorities, and bring about
the imprisonment of this Lemoine for the rest of his days in some sort of
in pace
, for the crime of lèse-jewelry. This is more urgent than the story of Galileo, more
modern, more open to the artistic evocation of a milieu, and all of a sudden I can
see a fine subject for a play for us, a play that could contain strong things about
the power of today’s big business, a power that at bottom drives government and the
law, opposing whatever calamitous thing any new invention has in store for it. Like
a bouquet, they brought Lucien the news, presenting me with the denouement of the
already sketched play, that their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself after the
fall in diamond shares, a collapse that annihilated a part of his fortune. A curious
person, Lucien assured us, that Marcel Proust, a being who lives entirely in the enthusiasm,
in the
pious adoration
, of certain landscapes, certain books, a person for example who is completely enamored
of the novels of Léon Daudet. And after a long silence, in the glow of after-dinner
expansiveness, Lucien stated: “No, it’s not because it concerns my brother, do not
believe it, Monsieur de Goncourt, absolutely not. But finally the truth must be told.”
And he cited this characteristic that emerged prettily from the illuminated elaboration
of his speech: “One day, a gentleman performed an immense favor for Marcel Proust,
who, to thank him,
brought him to the country to dine. But while they were chatting, the gentleman, who
was none other than Zola, absolutely refused to acknowledge that there had been in
France only one single truly great writer to whom only Saint-Simon came close, and
that this writer was Léon Daudet. Upon which, my word! Proust, forgetting the gratitude
he owed Zola, sent him flying ten steps backwards with a pair of blows, and knocked
him flat on his back. The next day they fought, but, despite the intervention of Ganderax,
Proust was firmly opposed to any reconciliation.” And all of a sudden, in the clutter
of the coffee cups being passed round, Lucien whispered in my ear, with a comic whine,
this revelation: “Don’t you see, Monsieur de Goncourt, if even despite
La Fourmilière
I’m not aware of this fashion, it’s because I can
see
even the words people say, as if I were painting, in the
capture
of a nuance, with the same
sfumato
as Chanteloup’s Pagoda.” I left Lucien, my head all excited by this affair of the
diamond and of suicide, as if spoonfuls of brain had just been poured into me. And
on the staircase I met the new ambassador from Japan who, seeming ever so slightly
freakish and
decadent
, making him resemble a samurai holding, above my folding Coromandel screen, the two
pincers of a crayfish, graciously told me he had long been on assignment in the Honolulu
Islands where reading our books, my brother’s and mine, was the only thing capable
of tearing the natives away from the pleasures of caviar, a reading that was prolonged
till very late at night, in one go, with interludes consisting only of chewing some
cigars of the
country that come encased in long glass tubes, which are supposed to protect them
during the crossing from a certain distemper the sea gives them. And the minister
confessed to me his taste for our books, admitting he had known in Hong Kong a very
great lady there who had only two books on her night table:
La Fille Elisa
and
Robinson Crusoe
.

22 December
.

I awoke from my four o’clock siesta with the presentiment of some piece of bad news.
I had dreamt that the tooth that had made me suffer so when Cruet pulled it out, five
years ago, had grown in again. And straightway Pélagie came in, with this news brought
by Lucien Daudet, news she hadn’t come to tell me earlier so as not to disturb my
nightmare: Marcel Proust has not killed himself, Lemoine has invented nothing at all,
is nothing but a conjurer who isn’t even very clever, a kind of Robert-Houdin with
no hands. Just our luck! For once the present workaday, dull life had
taken on some artistry
, offered us a subject for a play! Facing Rodenbach, who was waiting for me to wake
up, I was not able to contain my disappointment, though I recovered myself sufficiently
to become animated, to give vent to some already-composed tirades that the false news
of the discovery and of the suicide had inspired in me, false news that was more artistic,
truer
, than the too-optimistic and
public
outcome, an outcome à la Sarcey, which Lucien told Pélagie was the real one. As for
me, it was nothing
but protest that I whispered for an hour to Rodenbach about the bad luck that has
always pursued us, my brother and me, making the biggest events into the smallest,
a people’s revolution into the sniffles of a stage prompter, so many obstacles raised
against the forward progress of our works. Now this time the jeweler’s guild has to
get mixed up in it! Then Rodenbach confessed to me the nub of his thinking, which
is that December has always been unlucky for us, for my brother and me, a month that
saw our pastimes brought to court, and the failure of
Henriette Maréchal
planned by the press, and the cold sore I had on my tongue the day before the only
speech I ever had to give, a cold sore that made people say I hadn’t dared to speak
at the tomb of Vallès, when I was the one who had asked to do so—a whole company of
mischances that, this man from the artistic North that is Rodenbach said superstitiously,
should make us avoid undertaking anything at all this month. Then, when I interrupted
the cabbalistic theories of the author of
Bruges la Morte
so as to go put on the tailcoat required for dinner at the Princess’, I said to him,
leaving him at the door of my dressing room: “So then, Rodenbach, you advise me to
reserve this month for my death!”

The diamond can be mined at strange depths (1300 meters). To bring the most brilliant
stone back, which alone can support the fire of a woman’s gaze (in Afghanistan, a
diamond is called “the eye of flame”), you will have to descend endlessly into the
dark kingdom. How many times will Orpheus wander astray before he brings Eurydice
back to daylight! But be not discouraged! If your heart loses its resolve, the stone
is there, and with its very distinct flame seems to say, “Courage, one more blow with
your pickaxe, and I am yours.” But one moment of hesitation, and you are dead. There
is salvation only in speed. A touching dilemma. To
resolve it, many lives wore themselves out in the Middle Ages. It was posited more
harshly at the beginning of the twentieth century (December 1907—January 1908). Someday
I will relate that magnificent Lemoine affair, the greatness of which no contemporary
has suspected; I will show the little man, with clumsy hands, his eyes burning with
the terrible search, a Jew probably (M. Drumont said so not without plausibility;
even today the Lemoustiers—a contraction of Monastère—are not uncommon in the Dauphiné,
the chosen land of Israel throughout the whole Middle Ages), leading all of Europe’s
politics for three months, forcing proud England to consent to a trade treaty that
was ruinous for it, to save its threatened mines, its discredited companies. No doubt
it would pay his weight in gold for us to yield the man up. His release on bail, the
greatest conquest of modern times (Sayous, Batbie), was three times refused. The deductive
German in front of his stein of beer, seeing the shares in De Beers go down day by
day, took heart again (the Harden retrial, Polish law, refusal to answer the Reichstag).
Touching immolation of the Jew throughout the ages! “You slander me, stubbornly accuse
me of treason against all evidence, on land, on sea (Dreyfus affair, Ullmo affair);
well then! I give you my gold (see the great development of Jewish banks at the end
of the nineteenth century), and more than gold, what you could still not buy with
the weight of gold: the diamond.” —Grave lesson; very sadly did I meditate on it during
that winter of 1908 when nature itself, abdicating all violence, became treacherous
instead. Never were
there fewer harsh cold spells, but there was a fog that even at noon the sun could
not contrive to pierce. What’s more, the temperature was very mild—all the more lethal.
Many deaths—more than in the preceding ten years—and, in January, violets under the
snow. One’s mind was quite disturbed by this Lemoine affair, which quite correctly
appeared to me immediately as an episode in the great struggle of wealth against science;
every day I went to the Louvre where instinctively the people linger, more often than
they do before da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, at the Crown diamonds. More than once I’ve had
trouble getting close to them. It goes without saying, this study attracted me, but
I did not like it. And my reason? I did not sense any life in it. Always that has
been my strength, my weakness too, this need for life. At the high point of the reign
of Louis XIV, when absolutism seems to have killed all freedom in France, for two
long years—more than a century—(1680-1789), peculiar headaches every day made me think
that I was going to be forced to abandon my history. I didn’t really recover my strength
until the Tennis Court Oath (20 June 1789). I felt similarly disturbed before this
strange realm of crystallization that is the world of the stone. Here there is no
more of the flexibility of the flower that, at the most arduous of my botanical researches,
very timidly—all the better—never stopped giving me courage: “Have confidence, fear
nothing, you are still in the midst of life, in history.”