The Lemoine Affair

IV BY HENRI DE RÉGNIER

I do not like the diamond at all. I see no beauty in it. The little beauty it adds to that of human faces is less an effect of its own than a reflection of theirs. It has neither the ocean clarity of the emerald, nor the unbounded azure of the sapphire. I prefer the smoky glint of the topaz to it, and above all the twilight charm of opals. They are emblematic and twofold. If moonlight makes half of their face iridescent, the other seems tinged by the pink and green glints of sunset. We are not so much amused by the colors it presents to us, as we are touched by the dreams it conjures up. To one who can encounter nothing beyond himself except the form of his own fate, they show an alternative and taciturn face.

There were many of them in the city where Hermas took me. The house we lived in was valuable more from the beauty of the site than from the comfort of the beings in it. The perspective of horizons was more carefully managed there than the furnishing of the premises was planned. It was more pleasant to daydream there than it was to sleep. It was more picturesque than comfortable. Overwhelmed by the heat during the day, the peacocks made their fateful, mocking cries heard all night long — cries that are, to tell the truth, more suitable for daydreaming than favorable to sleep. The sound of the bells kept one from finding sleep during the morning, failing the sleep that one can only really enjoy before daylight — though the later sleep at least makes up to a certain extent for the fatigue from having been completely deprived of the earlier. The majesty of the ceremonies whose hours their chimes announced was a poor recompense for the annoyance of being awakened at an hour when one is supposed to be asleep, if one wishes to be able, later on, to profit from the ensuing hours. The sole recourse then was to quit the cloth of the sheets and the feather of the pillow and go walk through the house. This undertaking, to tell the truth, although it had some charm, also presented danger. It was amusing without ceasing to be perilous. One would rather give up the pleasure of it than pursue the adventure. The parquet tiles that M. de Séryeuse had brought back from the islands were many-colored and disjointed, slippery and geometric. Their mosaic was brilliant and erratic. The pattern of its lozenges, now red, now black, offered to the gaze a more pleasing spectacle than the wooden floor — raised here, broken there — promised the step a sure gait.

The appeal of the walk one could have in the courtyard was not won by so many risks. One would go down into it around noon. The sun warmed the pavement, or the rain dripped from the rooftops. Sometimes wind made the weathervane creak. In front of the closed gate, monumental and covered with verdigris, a sculpted Hermes gave the shadow he projected the form of his caduceus. Dead leaves from nearby trees fell, swirling up to his heels, and folded onto the marble wings their wings of gold. Votive and potbellied, doves came to perch in the alcoves of the archivolt or on the splay of the pedestal, and often let fall a drab ball, flaky and gray. It splattered its intermittent, grainy mass on the gravel or on the grass, and, sticky with the grass it once had been, covered the grass abounding on the lawn and filling the footpath of what M. de Séryeuse called his garden.

Lemoine came often to stroll about there.

That is where I saw him for the first time. He seemed to be more aptly fitted in a lackey’s smock than clad in a doctor’s cap. The rogue claimed to be a doctor, though, in several sciences wherein it is more profitable to succeed than to which it is often prudent to devote oneself.

It was noon when his coach arrived, describing a circle in front of the steps. The pavement resounded with the team’s hooves; a valet ran up to pull down the folding step. In the street, women crossed themselves. The north wind blew. At the foot of the marble Hermes, the caducean shadow had taken on an elusive and shifty aspect. Pursued by the wind, it seemed to be laughing. Bells rang out. Between the bronze volleys of a great bell, a peal of smaller bells, out of time with each other, hazarded their crystal choreography. In the garden, a swing creaked. Dry seeds lay on top of the sundial. The sun shone and disappeared by turns. Agatized by its light, the Hermes of the threshold became darker from the sun’s obscuring than he would have been from its absence. Successive and ambiguous, the marmoreal face lived. A smile seemed to lengthen expiatory lips into the shape of a caduceus. The smell of willow, of pumice, of cineraria and marquetry escaped from the closed shutters of the office and from the half-open door of the vestibule. It made the dullness of the hour heavier. M. de Séryeuse and Lemoine continued to chat on the steps. One could hear an equivocal, shrill sound like a burst of furtive laughter. This was the gentleman’s sword, which clinked against the glass alchemical retort. The feathered hat of the one safeguarded him better from the wind than the silken nightcap of the other. Lemoine had a cold. From his nose, which he forgot to wipe, a little mucus had fallen onto his shirtfront and onto his suit. Its viscous, warm core had slipped down the linen of one, but had adhered to the cloth of the other, and held the silvery, fluent fringe that dripped from it in suspense above the void. The sun, piercing them, confused the sticky mucus with the diluted solution. One could make out just the one single succulent, quivering mass, transparent and hardening; and in the ephemeral brilliance with which it decorated Lemoine’s attire, it seemed to have fixed the prestige of a momentary diamond there, still hot, so to speak, from the oven from which it had emerged, and for which this unstable jelly, corrosive and alive as it was for one more instant, seemed at once, by its deceitful, fascinating beauty, to present both a mockery and a symbol.