The Lemoine Affair

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 century), 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.”