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.”
VII: 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
