The Lemoine Affair

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.

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 probably 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.