The Lemoine Affair (4 page)

The author of
Le Détour
and
Le Marché
—namely M. Henri Bernstein—has just had a play, or rather an ambiguous combination
of tragedy and vaudeville, performed by the actors of the Gymnase, which may not be
his
Athalie
or his
Andromaque
[Racine], his
L’Amour Veille
[Henry Roussel] or his
Les Sentiers de la Vertu
[Robert de Flers], but yet is something like his
Nicomède
[Corneille], which is not at all, as you may have heard, a completely contemptible
play and is not at all entirely a disgrace to the human spirit. Although the play
has reached, I will not say beyond the heavens, but
at least up to the highest clouds, where there is some exaggeration, it has done so
with legitimate success, since M. Bernstein’s play abounds with improbabilities, but
on a background of truth. That is where
The Lemoine Affair
differs from
La Rafale
, and, in general, from all of M. Bernstein’s tragedies, as well as from a good half
of Euripides’ comedies, which abound in truths, but on a background of improbability.
What’s more, this is the first time a play by M. Bernstein involves actual people,
from whom he had held back till now. The swindler Lemoine, then, wanting to dupe people
with his alleged discovery of how to make diamonds, goes to see … the greatest diamond-mine
owner in the world. As implausibility goes, you will agree that that is a rather considerable
one. This is one thing. At the very least, you expect that that magnate, who has all
the greatest affairs in the world to occupy him, will send Lemoine packing, just as
the prophet Nehemiah said from atop the ramparts of Jerusalem to those who held out
a ladder for him to come down,
Non possum descendere, magnum opus facio
. That would have been the perfect response. But not at all, he hurries to use the
ladder. The only difference is that instead of going down, he climbs up it. A bit
youthful, this Werner. This is not a role for M. Coquelin the younger, but rather
for M. Brulé. And now for another thing. Note that Lemoine does not make a gift of
this secret, which naturally is nothing but a trifling quack recipe. He sells it to
him for two million francs, and still makes him think it’s a steal:

Which doesn’t change much, all in all, of the implausibility of No. 1, but doesn’t
make the implausibility of No. 2 much worse. But finally, anything goes! My God, note
that until now we have been following the author who is a pretty good dramatist. We
are told that Lemoine discovered the secret of diamond-making. We know nothing of
that, after all; we are just told it, we want to go along with it, we’re game. Werner,
the great diamond expert, was taken in, and Werner, the crafty financier, paid up.
And we are taken in right along with him. A great English scholar, half-physicist,
half-nobleman, an English lord, as they say (but no, Madame, all lords are English,
so an English lord is a pleonasm; don’t start that again, no one heard you), swears
that Lemoine has genuinely discovered the philosopher’s stone. We can’t go any further
than we’ve gone. Boom! Suddenly the jewelers recognize Lemoine’s diamonds as the very
stones they sold him, and that they come
precisely from Werner’s own mine
. A bit much, that. The diamonds
still have the marks the jewelers had put on them
. Worse and worse:

Lemoine is arrested, Werner demands his money back, the English lord doesn’t say one
word more; all of a sudden we’ve stopped going along with it, and as always, in such
cases, we are furious at having gone on for so long, so we shift our anger to … Egad!
The author is there for something, I think. Werner immediately asks the judge to demand
the requisition of the envelope where the famous secret is enclosed. The judge assents
right away. No one more amiable than this judge. But Lemoine’s lawyer tells the judge
that such an action is illegal. The judge immediately desists; no one more pliable
than this judge. As for Lemoine, he absolutely wants to wander along with the judge,
the lawyers, the experts, etc., over to Amiens where his factory is, to prove to them
that he can make diamonds. And every time the amiable, pliable judge repeats to him
that he swindled Werner, Lemoine replies, “Let’s stop talking and go for a stroll.”
To which the judge gives him the reply, “The stroll, in my opinion, is a dreary thing.”
No one better versed in Molière’s plays than this judge. Etc.

If Lemoine had actually made a diamond, he would no doubt have satisfied, to a certain
extent, that coarse materialism with which whoever intends to meddle in human affairs
must reckon; he certainly would not have given to souls in love with the ideal that
element of exquisite spirituality by which, after so long a time, we are still sustained.
That in any case is what the magistrate who was appointed to question him seems, with
a rare keenness, to have understood. Every time that Lemoine, with the smile we can
imagine, proposed that he come to Lille, to his factory, where they could see if he
did or did not know how to make a diamond, the judge Le Poittevin, with exquisite
tact, did not let
him continue, indicating to him with a word, sometimes with a rather pointed joke,
¹
but still restrained by a rare feeling for moderation, that this was not what was
at question, that the issue lay elsewhere. Nothing, in any case, authorizes us to
assert that even at that moment when, feeling his case was lost (as early as January,
with no longer any doubt remaining about the sentence, the accused naturally clung
to the most fragile last hope), Lemoine ever claimed that he knew how to make diamonds.
The place he offered to lead the experts, which translations call a “factory,” a word
that could have lent itself to misinterpretations, was located at the far end of the
valley which extends for more than thirty kilometers and terminates in Lille. Even
these days, after all the deforestation it has undergone, it is a veritable garden,
planted with poplars and willow trees, strewn with fountains and flowers. At the height
of summer, the coolness there is delicious. It is hard for us to imagine today how
it has lost its groves of chestnut trees, its copses of hazel trees and vines, all
the fertility that made it an enchanting place to visit during Lemoine’s time. An
Englishman who lived at that time, John Ruskin, whom unfortunately we read now only
in the pitifully insipid translation that Marcel Proust has bequeathed to us, extols
the grace of its poplars, the icy coolness of its springs. The traveler, having just
emerged from the solitudes of the Beauce and the Sologne, which are always made desolate
by an implacable sun, could truly believe, when he saw their transparent water
sparkling through the foliage, that some genie, touching the ground with his magic
wand, made the diamond too gush forth from it. Lemoine, probably, never meant to say
anything else. It seems he wanted, not without anxiety, to make use of all the delays
the French law possesses, and which easily allowed the investigation to be prolonged
until mid-April, when that part of the country is especially delicious. In the hedges,
the lilac and the wild rose, the white and pink hawthorn, are all in bloom, and cover
every path with embroidery of an incomparable freshness of tones, where the various
sorts of birds of that countryside come to mingle their songs. The golden oriole,
the titmouse, the blue-headed nightingale, sometimes the waxbill, answer each other
from branch to branch. The hills, clad in the distance with the pink flowers of fruit
trees, unfurl their ravishingly delicate curves against the blue sky. By the shores
of rivers that are still the great charm of that region, but where sawmills today
keep up an unbearable noise at all hours, the silence would have been disturbed only
by the sudden rise of one of those little trout whose rather bland flesh is still
the most exquisite of delights for the Picardy peasant. No doubt that by leaving the
furnace of the Palais de Justice, experts and judges would have experienced just like
everyone else the eternal mirage of that beautiful water that the noonday sun truly
sets with diamonds. To lie down by the river’s edge, to greet with one’s laughter
a small boat whose wake ruffles the changing silk of the water, to extract a few azure
scraps from that sapphire gorget that is the peacock’s neck,
gaily to chase young washerwomen to their scrubbing-stones while singing a popular
tune,
²
to soak in soap suds a reed pipe carved from stubble into the shape of Pan’s flute,
to watch bubbles bead up there that combine to form the delicious colors of Iris’
scarf and to call that “threading pearls,” to join choruses sometimes holding each
other by the hand, to listen to the nightingale sing, to watch the shepherd’s star
rise—those were undoubtedly the pleasures to which Lemoine counted on inviting the
honorable gentlemen Le Poittevin, Bordas and company, pleasures of a truly idealistic
race, where everything ends in song, where since the end of the nineteenth century
the slight drunkenness of the wine of Champagne seems even too coarse, where one seeks
gaiety only from the vapor that, from sometimes incalculable depths, rises to the
surface of a faintly mineral spring.

The name “Lemoine”—“Monk”—should not, however, give us the notion of one of those
severe ecclesiastical attitudes that would have made Lemoine himself not at all susceptible
to such poetically
enchanting impressions. It was probably only a nickname, the kind many people have,
perhaps a simple pet name that the reserved manners of the young scholar, with his
life scarcely given over to worldly dissipations, had quite naturally brought to the
lips of frivolous people. Besides, it seems to me that we should not attach much importance
to these epithets, many of which seem to have been chosen by chance, probably to distinguish
two people who might otherwise have been confused with each other. The slightest nuance,
or some distinction that’s often completely irrelevant, suffices to identify the man.
The simple epithet of
senior
, or
junior
, added to the same name, seemed sufficient. It is often a question in documents of
that era of a certain
Coquelin the Elder
who seems to have been a kind of proconsular individual, perhaps a wealthy administrator
like Crassus or Murena. Without any definite text allowing us to affirm that he served
in person, he held a distinguished position in the order of the Legion of Honor, created
expressly by Napoleon to reward military merit. This nickname of “the Elder” may have
been given him to distinguish him from another Coquelin, an esteemed actor, called
Coquelin the Younger
, without our being able to discover whether there was in fact an actual difference
in age between them. It seems they simply wanted to use that method to honor the distance
that still existed at that time between the actor and the politician, the man who
had performed civic responsibilities. Perhaps they quite simply wanted to avoid any
confusion on the electoral lists.

 … A society where beautiful women, where noblemen of high birth, adorn their bodies
with real diamonds is condemned to irremediable coarseness. The worldly man, the man
for whom the dry rationality, the entirely superficial brilliance provided by classical
education, are enough, might take pleasure in it. Truly pure souls, minds passionately
attached to the good and the true, would experience an unbearable sensation of suffocation
in such a society. Such customs could exist in the past. We will not see them again.
During Lemoine’s time, according to all appearances, they had long ago become obsolete.
The dull collection of implausible stories which bears the title
The Human Comedy
by Balzac is perhaps the work neither of one single man nor of one single era. Yet
his still unshaped style, his ideas all marked by an old-fashioned absolutism, allow
us to place its publication at least two centuries before Voltaire. However, Mme de
Beauséant, who, in these insipidly dry fictions, personifies the perfectly distinguished
woman, already shows scorn for the wives of nouveau riche businessmen appearing in
public adorned with precious stones. It is probable that in Lemoine’s day a woman
anxious to please was content to add some leaves to her hair where some dewdrop still
trembled, as sparkling as the rarest diamond. In the cento of disparate poems entitled
Songs of the Streets and the Woods
, which is commonly attributed to Victor Hugo, although it is probably a little later
than that, the words “diamonds” and “pearls” are used indiscriminately to portray
the glittering of drops of water gushing from a
murmuring spring, sometimes from a simple shower. In a kind of erotic little romance
that recalls the
Song of Songs
, the bride says in so many words to the Husband that she wants no other diamonds
than the drops of dew. Probably it is a question here of a generally accepted custom,
not of an individual preference. This last hypothesis is, moreover, excluded in advance
by the perfect banality of these little pieces that have been ascribed to the name
of Hugo by virtue no doubt of the same desire for publicity that must have made Qoheleth
(
Ecclesiastes
) decide to adorn his spiritual maxims with the respected name of Solomon, who was
much in vogue at that time.

Moreover, if they find out tomorrow how to make a diamond, I will undoubtedly be one
of the least likely people to attach much importance to it. That has a lot to do with
my education. I had scarcely reached the age of forty, when at the public meetings
of the Society of Jewish Studies, I met some of the people liable to be strongly impressed
by news of such a discovery. At Tréguier, with my first masters, then later on at
Issy, at Saint-Sulpice, this news would have been met with the most extreme indifference,
perhaps with an ill-concealed scorn. Whether or not Lemoine found a way to make diamonds,
we cannot imagine how little that would have affected my sister Henriette, my uncle
Pierre, M. Le Hir, or M. Carbon. At bottom, I have always remained on this point,
as well as on many others, an old-fashioned disciple of Saint Tudual and Saint Colomban.
This has often led me to utter, in all things having to
do with luxury, unforgivably naïve remarks. At my age, I would not even be capable
of going to buy a ring at a jeweler’s. Ah! It’s not in our Trégorrois that young ladies
receive from their fiancés, like the Shulamite, strings of pearls, expensive necklaces
set with silver, “
vermiculata argento
.” For me, the only precious stones that would still be capable of making me leave
the Collège de France, despite my rheumatism, and take to the sea, but only if one
of my old Breton saints consented to take me out on his apostolic bark, are the ones
the fishermen in Saint-Michel-en-Grève sometimes glimpse at the bottom of the sea
during fair weather, where the city of Ys used to stand, set in the stained-glass
windows of its hundred drowned cathedrals.

 … No doubt cities like Paris, London, Paris-Plage, Bucharest, will look less and
less like the city that appeared to the presumed author of the Fourth Gospel, the
city built of emerald, jacinth, beryl, chrysoprase, and other precious stones, with
twelve doors each formed from a single fine pearl. But living in such a city would
soon make us yawn with boredom, and who knows if the incessant contemplation of a
setting like the one in which John’s
Apocalypse
unfolds might risk making the universe perish suddenly from a brainstorm? More and
more the
fundabo te in saphiris et ponam jaspidem propugnacula tua et omnes terminus tuos in
lapides desiderabiles
will appear to us as a simple figure of speech, like a promise kept for the last
time at St. Mark’s in Venice. It is clear that if he supposed he ought not deviate
from the principles of
urban architecture according to Revelation, and if he meant to apply to the letter
the
Fundamentum primum calcedonius …, duodecimum amethystus
, then my eminent friend M. Bouvard would risk postponing indefinitely the continuation
of Boulevard Haussmann.

Patience, then! Humanity, patience. Rekindle tomorrow the furnace that has already
gone out a thousand times whence the diamond might one day emerge! With a good humor
that the Eternal can envy in you, perfect the crucible where you will make carbon
rise to temperatures unknown to Lemoine and Bertholet. Tirelessly repeat the
sto ad ostium et pulso
, without knowing if a voice will ever reply:
Veni, veni, coronaberis
. Your story has now entered a path from which the stupid fantasies of the vain and
the aberrant will never contrive to make you stray. The day Lemoine, by an exquisite
play on words, called simple drops of water valuable only in their freshness and limpidity
“precious stones,” the cause of idealism was won forever. He did not make a diamond:
he made the price of an ardent imagination, of perfect simplicity of heart, incontestable—things
important in other ways for the future of the planet. They will lose their value only
on the day that a deeper knowledge of cerebral localizations and the progress of brain
surgery allow us easily to set in motion the infinitely delicate mechanisms that awaken
modesty and an innate sense of beauty. On that day, the free thinker, the man who
has a high idea of virtue, would see the value on which he placed all his hopes undergo
an irresistible movement of depreciation. Surely the
believer who hopes to exchange a virtue he bought cheaply with indulgences for a share
of eternal felicities, is desperately attached to an untenable proposition. But it
is clear the virtue of the free thinker would scarcely be worth anything at all the
day it becomes merely the compulsory result of the success of an intracranial operation.

Men of a given era see among the various personalities who by turns seek out public
attention all sorts of differences that they think are enormous, yet that posterity
will not notice. We are all rough drafts where the genius of one epoch is prelude
to a masterpiece that it will probably never execute. For us, between two personalities
like the honorable M. Denys Cochin and Lemoine, the dissimilarities leap to the eye.
They might perhaps escape the Seven Sleepers, if they awoke a second time from the
sleep they fell into in the reign of the Emperor Decius which was thought to last
a scant three hundred seventy-two years. The Messianic point of view can no longer
be our own. Less and less does the privation of some gift or other of the mind seem
to us to deserve the wonderful curses it inspired in the unknown author of the Book
of Job. “Compensation”—this word, which dominates Emerson’s philosophy, could well
be the last word of all sound judgment, the judgment of the true agnostic. The Comtesse
de Noailles, if she is the author of the poems attributed to her, left an extraordinary
work, a hundred times superior to Qoheleth, or to Béranger’s songs. But what a false
position that must have given
her in society! She seems, moreover, to have understood this perfectly and to have
led in the country, perhaps not without some ennui,
³
an entirely simple, retired life, in the little orchard that usually serves as her
interlocutor. The excellent singer Polin might perhaps be a little lacking in metaphysics;
but he possesses a quality that is a thousand times more precious and which neither
the son of Sirach nor Jeremiah ever knew: a delicious joviality, exempt from the slightest
trace of affectation, etc.