The Lemoine Affair Page 4

  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 prob
ably 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.

  1 Trial, Volume II passim, see especially “country,” etc.

  2 Some of those deliciously naïve songs have been preserved for us. It is generally a scene borrowed from daily life that the singer gaily recounts. The words of “Zizi Panpan,” by themselves, which are almost always cut off at regular intervals, bring nothing but a rather vague sense to the mind. It was probably pure rhythmic indications supposed to mark the measure for an ear that would otherwise have been tempted to forget it, perhaps even simply an admiring exclamation, uttered upon seeing Juno’s bird, as these often-repeated words les plumes de paon (the peacock’s feathers) would tend to have us think, which follow them without much pause.

  3 We may wonder if this exile was indeed voluntary, and if we should not rather see in it one of those decisions of authority similar to the one that prevented Mme de Staël from returning to France, perhaps because of some law, the text of which has not reached us, and which forbade women from writing. The exclamations repeated a thousand times in these poems with such monotonous insistence: “Ah! To leave! Ah! To leave! To take the train that whistles as it rushes onward!” (Occident.) “Let me go, let me go.” (Tumulte dans l’aurore.) “Ah! Let me leave.” (Les héros.) “Ah! To return to my city, to see the Seine flow within its noble banks. To say to Paris: I’m on my way, I’ll be back, I’m coming!” etc., show clearly that she was not free to take the train. Some verses where she seems to be adapting to her solitude: “What if already my sky is too divine for me,” etc., have obviously been added afterwards to try to disarm the authorities’ suspicions by a semblance of submission.

  IX IN THE MEMOIRS OF SAINT-SIMON

  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 appro
ach 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.”