The Lemoine Affair (5 page)

Wedding of Talleyrand-Périgord.—Successes won by the Imperials at Château-Thierry,
exceedingly inferior.—Le Moine, by La Mouchi, is introduced to the Regent.—Conversation
I had with M. the Duc d’Orléans on this subject. He is resolved to bring up the affair
with the Duc de Guiche.—Fantasies of the Murats on the rank of foreign prince.—Conversation
of the Duc de Guiche with M. the Duc d’Orléans on Le Moine, at the parvulo given at
Saint-Cloud for the King of England traveling incognito in France.—Unprecedented presence
of the Comte de Fels at this parvulo.—Journey to France of an Infante of Spain, very
remarkable
.

That year took place the wedding of good lady Blumenthal with L. de Talleyrand-Périgord,
who has been mentioned many times in the course of these Memoirs, with emphatic and
well-deserved praise. The Rohans hosted the wedding, which was attended by people
of quality. He did not want his wife to remain seated during the wedding, but she
presumed to use a slipcover on her chair and incontinently had herself addressed as
Duchess of Montmorency, which did not advance her in the least. The campaign continued
against the Imperials who despite the revolts in Hungary caused by the high price
of bread won some successes at Château-Thierry. It was there that for the first time
we saw the impropriety of M. de Vendôme, publicly called “Highness.” The scourge reached
even the Murats, and did not fail to cause me anxieties against which I kept up my
spirits only with difficulty, so that I had gone far from the court, to spend the
Easter fortnight at La Ferté in the company of a gentleman who had served in my regiment
and was highly regarded by the late King, when on the eve of Low Sunday a letter that
Mme de Saint-Simon sent advised me to go to Meudon as quickly as possible for an important
affair concerning M. the Duc d’Orléans. At first I thought it was a matter of the
affair of the false Marquis de Ruffec, which has been noted in its place; but Biron
had skimmed it, and from a few words Mme de Saint-Simon dropped, about gems and some
rogue named Le Moine, I was quite certain that it was not one more problem of those
alembics that, without the influence I exercised with the chancellor,
had been so close to getting—I scarcely dare write it—M. the Duc d’Orléans locked
up in the Bastille. We do in fact know that this unfortunate prince, having no true
or extensive knowledge about births, family histories, or what truth there might be
in pretensions, the absurdity that bursts forth from some people and lets the bedrock
be glimpsed which is nothing at all, the brilliance of marriages and offspring, even
less the art of distinguishing in his courtesy between higher and lower rank, or of
charming others with the obliging word that shows one knows what is the real and enduring,
dare I say,
intrinsecum
of genealogies, this prince had never learned how to enjoy himself at court, had
therefore seen himself abandoned by what he had first turned away from, to such an
extent that he had fallen, although a first-rate prince of the blood, to immersing
himself in chemistry, in painting, in the Opera, the musicians from which often came
to bring him their scores and their violins which held no secrets for him. We also
saw with what pernicious art his enemies, and above all the Maréchal de Villeroy,
had used his taste for chemistry against him, so out of place, during the strange
death of the Dauphin and the Dauphine. Far from the frightful rumors that had been
spread at the time with pernicious cleverness by anyone who came close to the Maintenon
causing M. the Duc d’Orléans to repent of researches that were so little suited to
a man of his breeding, we saw that on the contrary he went on pursuing them with Mirepoix,
every night, in the quarries of Montmartre, working on coal that he heated
with a blowtorch, where, by a contradiction that can be conceived of only as Providence’s
chastisement of this prince, he drew an abominable glory from not believing in God
and confessed to me more than once that he had hoped to see the devil.

The Mississippi business had come to an abrupt end and the Duc d’Orléans came, against
my advice, to pronounce his useless edict against gemstones. Those who owned some,
after having shown eagerness and experienced difficulty in selling them, preferred
to keep them by hiding them, which is much easier to do with gems than with money,
so that despite all the sleights of hand and various threats of imprisonment, the
financial situation had been only very slightly and very temporarily bettered. Le
Moine knew this and thought he could make M. the Duc d’Orléans believe the situation
would improve if he could persuade him that it was possible to make diamonds. He hoped
at the same time thereby to flatter that prince’s detestable tastes for chemistry,
and thus gain his favor. This did not happen right away. But it was not difficult
to approach M. the Duc d’Orléans provided one possessed neither high birth, nor virtue.
We have seen what the dinners of those ruffians were, from which only good company
were kept at a distance by careful exclusion. Le Moine, however, who had spent his
life buried in the most obscure debauchery and did not know even one person at court
who could call him by name, did not know whom to address in order to win access to
the Palais Royal; but in the end, La Mouchi did the honors. He saw M. the Duc d’Orléans,
told him
that he knew how to make diamonds, and this prince, naturally credulous, fell for
it. I thought at first that the best thing was to approach the King through Maréchal.
But I feared breaking the news, which might hurt the one I wanted to save, so I resolved
to go straight to the Palais Royal. I ordered my carriage, simmering with impatience,
and I threw myself into it like a man who is taking leave of his senses. I had often
said to M. the Duc d’Orléans that I was not a man to importune him with my advice,
but that when I had any, if I dared say, to give him, he should believe it was urgent,
so I asked him to do me the good favor of receiving me right away since I had never
been of a humor to wait quietly in the anteroom. His chief valets could have saved
me that trouble, in any case, because of the knowledge I had of the whole inner workings
of his court. But that day he had me come in as soon as my carriage had pulled up
in the inmost courtyard of the Palais Royal, which was always full of those to whom
entrance should have been forbidden, since, by a shameful prostitution of all dignities
and by the deplorable weakness of the Regent, those who were of the lowest quality,
who did not even fear making their way up in long coats, could penetrate the court
just as easily as dukes and almost on the same standing. Those are matters one might
treat as being of no consequence, but to which men of the previous reign would not
have given credence, who, fortunately for them, had died promptly enough not to witness
such things. Immediately ushered into the presence of the Regent whom I found without
a single one of
his surgeons or other domestics, and after I had greeted him with a very perfunctory
bow that was returned me in exactly the same way: “Well, what is it now?” he asked
awkwardly, as if humoring me. “Since you order me to speak, Monsieur,” I said heatedly,
keeping my gaze fixed on his own, which could not sustain it, “it is only that you
are in the process of losing in the eyes of everyone the little esteem and consideration”—those
were the very words I used—“that most of society has kept for you.”

And, sensing him deeply wounded (because of which, despite what I knew of his insouciance,
I conceived some hope), without pausing, so as to unburden myself once and for all
of the unfortunate medicine I had to make him swallow, and so as not to give him time
to interrupt me, I represented to him with the most frightful detail with what abandon
he lived at the court, and how advanced this neglect—the right word had to be said,
this contempt—had become in a few years; how these would be increased by the intrigues
that would not fail to use the so-called inventions of Le Moine to cast wicked accusations
against the Duc d’Orléans himself that might be absurd, but dangerous down to the
last point; I reminded him—and I still tremble sometimes, at night when I wake up,
when I think of the boldness I had in using these very words—that he had been accused
many times of poisoning the princes who barred his way to the throne; that this great
pile of gemstones they would have accepted as real would help him more easily attain
the throne of Spain, for which reason no
one doubted there was an entente between him, the Viennese court, the Emperor, and
Rome; that because of the detestable authority of Rome he rejected Mme d’Orléans,
and that it was a blessing from Providence for him that her recent confinements were
fortunate, since otherwise the wicked rumors of poisoning would have been renewed;
that to tell the truth, for desiring the death of Madame his wife, he was not like
his brother guilty of Italian taste—these were my very terms—but that it was the only
vice of which he was not accused (along with not having clean hands), since his relations
with Mme la Duchesse de Berry seemed to many not to be those of a father; that if
he had not inherited the abominable taste of Monsieur for all the rest, he was indeed
his son from the habit of the perfumes that had put him out of favor with the king
who could not bear them, and later on had favored the frightful rumors of having made
an attempt on the Dauphine’s life, and by having always put into practice the detestable
maxim of dividing to conquer with the help of repeating rumors from one person to
another which were the plague of his court, as they had been that of Monsieur, his
father, where they had prevented a unified reign: that he had preserved for Monsieur’s
favorites a consideration that he did not grant to another, and that it was they—I
did not force myself to name Effiat—who, aided by Mirepoix and La Mouchi, had cleared
the way for Le Moine; that having as his only shield only men who no longer counted
for anything after the death of Monsieur and who during his life had only amounted
to anything
because of the horrid conviction everyone had, even the king who had thus arranged
to marry Mme d’Orléans, that one could obtain anything from them by means of money,
and from him by those in whose clutches he was, no one feared attacking him by the
most odious, the most intimate calumny, that it was high time, if indeed there still
was time, for him finally to recover his grandeur and there was only one way to do
that: to take measures in the greatest secrecy to have Le Moine arrested and, as soon
as the thing was decided, not to delay the execution of it, and not to let him ever
return to France.

M. the Duc d’Orléans, who had merely exclaimed once or twice at the beginning of this
speech, had afterwards kept the silence of a man devastated by such a great blow;
but my last words finally made a few of his own come out of his mouth. He was not
spiteful, and resolution was not his strong point:

“What, then!” he said to me in a complaining tone, “Arrest him? But what if his invention
happens to be real?”

“What’s this, Monsieur,” I replied, utterly surprised at such an extreme and pernicious
blindness, “how can you think that, and so soon after having been disabused about
the writing of the false Marquis de Ruffec? But really, if you have even one doubt,
call for the man who knows more than anyone else in France about chemistry and all
the sciences, as has been recognized by the academies and by astronomers; his character
and birth, and the stainless life that has accompanied him,
are your guarantee of his word.” He understood that I was talking about the Duc de
Guiche, and with the joy of a man entangled in conflicting choices, from whom another
man has removed the anxiety of having to make the right one:

“Excellent! We both had the same idea,” he said. “Guiche will decide, but I cannot
see him today. You know that the King of England, traveling quite incognito under
the name of the Earl of Stanhope, is coming tomorrow to talk with the King about matters
in Holland and Germany; I’m giving him a party at Saint-Cloud, to which Guiche is
invited. You will speak to him and me both, after dinner. But are you sure he’ll come?”
he added in an embarrassed way.

I understood that he didn’t dare summon the Duc de Guiche to the Palais Royal, where,
as you may imagine from the kind of people that M. the Duc d’Orléans saw, with whom
Guiche was not at all acquainted, aside from Besons and me, he came as seldom as he
could, knowing that it was the libertines who ranked first there rather than men like
himself. Also the Regent, always fearing the duke would shower him with reproaches,
lived in constant suspicion and reserve towards him. Very careful to give everyone
his due and not being unaware of what was due the true son of Monsieur, Guiche visited
him only on special occasions, and I do not think anyone had seen him at the Palais
Royal since he had come to pay him his respects upon the death of Monsieur, and the
pregnancy of Mme d’Orléans. Even then he stayed only a short while, with indeed an
air of respect, but as
one who knew how to show with discernment that he was addressing, not the person,
but the rank of a first prince of the blood. M. the Duc d’Orléans sensed this and
did not fail to be affected by so bitter and cutting a treatment.

As I was leaving the Palais Royal, deeply sorry to see a project consigned to the
parvulo
⁴
at Saint-Cloud, something which might not even be carried out at all if it wasn’t
done at the very instant, so great were the habitual fickleness and sophistries of
M. the Duc d’Orléans, a curious adventure befell me that I relate here only because
it foretold only too well what would happen at the parvulo. I had just climbed into
my carriage where Mme de Saint-Simon was awaiting me, when I was utterly surprised
to see about to pass in front of it the carriage of S. Murat, so well-known by armies
for his valor, and for that of his entire family. His sons had covered themselves
with honor by traits worthy of antiquity; one, who lost a leg, shines everywhere with
beauty; another son died, leaving parents who were inconsolable; so much so that although
displaying pretensions as unbearable as those of the Bouillons, they did not lose
the esteem of respectable people as the Bouillons had.