The Lemoine Affair Read online

  V IN “THE GONCOURT JOURNALS”

  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!”

  VI “THE LEMOINE AFFAIR” BY MICHELET

  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 centu
ry), 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.”

  VI IN THE WEEKLY THEATER REVIEW BY M. ÉMILE FAGUET

  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:

  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.

  VIII BY ERNEST RENAN

  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.