Marcel Proust - The Lemoine Affair

Admire my kindnesses and the little sold to you The wonderful treasure my hand dispenses to you .

O great power

Of the Panacea!

(see Molière, L’Amour Médecin .)

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:

In the marked diamond that comes thus out of the oven,

I no longer recognize the author of Le Détour .

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, 1but 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, 2to 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.