The Lemoine Affair

by Marcel Proust

  But some, thinking of the wealth that could have come to them, felt ready to faint; for they would have placed it all at the feet of a woman by whom they had been scorned until now, who would have finally given them the secret of her kiss and the sweetness of her body. They saw themselves with her, in the country, till the end of their days, in a house all made of whitewood, by the dark shore of a large river. They would have known the cry of the petrel, the coming of the fog, the rocking of the ships, the formation of clouds, and would have remained for hours with her body on their lap, watching the tide rise and the moorings knock together from their terrace, in a wicker chair, beneath a blue-striped marquee, on the bowling green. And they ended up seeing nothing more than two clusters of purple flowers, trailing down to the swift water that they can almost touch, in the bleak light of an afternoon without sun, along a reddish wall crumbling away. For those people, the very excess of their distress took away the strength to curse the accused; but everyone hated him, reflecting that he had cheated them of debauchery, of honors, of fame, of genius; sometimes of more indefinable fancies, of all that was profound and sweet that everyone harbored, ever since childhood, each in the particular folly of his dream.

  III CRITIQUE OF THE NOVEL BY M. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ON “THE LEMOINE AFFAIR,” BY SAINTE-BEUVE, IN HIS COLUMN IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL

  The Lemoine Affair … by Mr. Gustave Flaubert! Especially so soon after Salammbô, the title is altogether a surprising one. What’s this? The author has set up his easel in the midst of Paris, at the law courts in the Palais de Justice, in the very chamber of criminal appeals …: and here we thought he was still in Carthage! Mr. Flaubert—estimable both in his impulse and his predilection—is not one of those writers whom Martial so subtly mocked and who, past masters in one field, or with the reputation of being so, confine themselves to it, dig themselves down into it, anxious above all not to offer any foothold for criticism, exposing only one wing at a time in any maneuver. Mr. Flaubert, on the contrary, likes to multiply his reconnaissance missions and his sorties, and confront the enemy on all sides—nay, he accepts all challenges, regardless of the conditions that are offered, and never demands a choice of weapons, never seeks strategic advantage from the lay of the land. But this time, it must be acknowledged, this precipitous about-face, this return from Egypt (or very nearly) like Napoleon, which no victorious Battle of the Nile can justify, has not seemed very fortunate; we have detected in it, or thought we did, let’s say, a faint whiff of mystification. Some people have even gone so far as to utter, not without some semblance of justification, the word “gamble.” Has Mr. Flaubert at least won this gamble? That is what we are about to examine in all candor, but without ever forgetting that the author is the son of a much to be lamented man whom we have all known, a professor at the École de Médecine in Rouen, who left his mark and his influence on his profession and in his province; or that this likeable son—whatever opinion you may proffer about what our over-hasty young are not afraid, boosted by friendship, to hail already as his “talent”—deserves, in any case, every consideration for the renowned simplicity of his narrations, always sure and perfectly executed—he, the very opposite of simplicity as soon as he picks up a pen!—by the refinement and invariable delicacy of his procedure.

  The narrative begins with a scene that, if it had been better directed, could have given us a rather favorable idea of Mr. Flaubert, in that immediate and unexpected genre of the sketch, the study drawn from reality. We are at the Palais de Justice, in the Criminal Court, where the Lemoine case is underway, during an adjournment of the hearing. The windows have just been closed by order of the magistrate. And here an eminent lawyer assures me that the magistrate would in fact not be sitting there, but would more naturally and properly have withdrawn to the council chamber during the adjournment. This of course is only a minor detail. But how do you, who have just told us (as if you had actually counted them!) the number of elephants and onagers in the Carthaginian army, how do you hope, I ask you, to have your word believed when, for a reality that is so nearby, so easily verifiable, so basic even and not in the least detailed, you commit such blunders! But we’ll move on: the author wanted an opportunity to describe the magistrate, and he didn’t let one escape him. This magistrate has “a clown’s face” (which is enough to make the reader lose interest), “a gown too narrow for his girth” (a rather clumsy characterization that portrays nothing), “aspirations to wit.” We’ll again overlook the clown’s face! The author is of a school that never sees anything noble or decent in humanity. Mr. Flaubert, however, a thorough Norman if ever there was one, comes from a land of subtle chicanery and lofty cunning that has given France quite a few prominent lawyers and magistrates, I don’t want to single out anyone here. Without even limiting ourselves to the boundaries of Normandy, the image of a magistrate such as Jeannin about whom Mr. Villemain has given us more than one delicate description, of a Mathieu Marais, a Saumaise, a Bouhier, even of the pleasant Patru, of one of these men who are distinguished by the wisdom of their advice and who are of such compelling merit, would be as interesting, I believe, and as true as that of the magistrate with “a clown’s face” who is shown to us here. Enough about the clown’s face! But if he has “aspirations to wit,” how do you know about it, since he hasn’t even opened his mouth yet? Similarly, a little later on, the author will point out to us, among the crowd he describes, a “reactionary.” That is a common enough designation today. But here, I ask Mr. Flaubert again: “A reactionary? How can you recognize one at a distance? Who told you? How do you know about it?” The author evidently is amusing himself, and all these characteristics are invented on a whim. But that’s nothing yet; we’ll go on. The author continues portraying the public, or rather purely chosen “models” he has grouped together in his studio at his leisure: “Taking an orange out of his pocket, a black man …” Traveler! You use only words of truth, of “objectivity,” you make a profession of it, you make a display of it; but, beneath this self-styled impersonality, how quickly we can recognize you, even if it’s only from this black man, this orange, that parrot just now, who have just disembarked with you, all these accessories you have brought back with you that you hurry to slap onto your sketch—the most variegated, I declare, and the least authentic, the least lifelike one your brush has ever struggled with.

  So the black man takes an orange out of his pocket, and by doing so, he “wins esteem”! Mr. Flaubert, I understand, means that in a crowd someone who can put himself to use and who shows off some advantage, even an ordinary one familiar to everyone—someone who takes out a goblet, for example, when someone else is drinking out of a bottle next to him; or a newspaper, if he is the only one who thought to buy one—that this person is immediately singled out, noticed and pointed out by others. But confess that when it comes down to it you don’t mind, by risking this unusual and out of place expression of “winning esteem,” insinuating that all esteem, even the highest and most sought-after, is not much more than that, that it is made of envy inspired by possessions that are at bottom without any intrinsic value. Well, we say to Mr. Flaubert, that is not true; esteem—and we know that the example will touch you, since it is only in literature that you belong to the school of insensitivity, of impassivity—is acquired by a whole life devoted to science, to humanity. Literature, once upon a time, could procure it also, when it was only the gauge and so to speak the flower of the mind’s urbanity, of that entirely human disposition that can indeed have its predilections and its goals, but that allows, alongside images of vice and ridicule, those of innocence and virtue. Without going back to the ancients (who were much more “naturalist” than you will ever be, but who, on the painting we see in its material frame, always make a fully divine ray of light appear clearly, as if it were in the open air, which shines its light on the pediment and illumines the contrast), without going back to them, whether they go by the name of Homer or Moschus, Bion or Leonidas of Tarentum, not to mention more deliberate portray
als, tell us if you please, is this something different from what these same writers have always done, writers you do not fear to claim as your own? Saint-Simon above all, next to the atrocious and slanderous portraits of a Noailles or a Harlay, what great brushstrokes doesn’t he use to show us, in its light and its proportion, the virtue of a Montal, a Beauvilliers, a Rancé, a Chevreuse? And even in that “Human Comedy,” or the one so called, where Mr. de Balzac, with an almost mocking conceit, claims to outline “scenes” (actually entirely fabulous) “of Parisian and provincial life” (he, a man incapable of observation if ever there was one), compared with and almost making up for the Hulots, the Philippe Bridaus, the Balthazar Claes, as he calls them, and of whom your Narr’Havas and your Shahabarims have no reason to be envious, I admit, hasn’t he imagined an Adeline Hulot, a Blanche de Mortsauf, a Marguerite de Solis?

  Indeed, it would have astonished, and rightly so, the Jacquemonts, the Darus, the Mérimées, the Ampères, all those men of delicacy and scholarship who knew him so well and who did not think there was any need, for such a trifle, to make so many bells ring out, if someone had told them that the witty Stendhal, to whom we owe so many clear and fruitful views, so many apposite remarks, would pass as a novelist in our day. But finally, he is even truer than you are! And there is more reality in the smallest study by—I’ll say Sénac or Meilhan, by Ramond or Althon Shée—than in yours, so laboriously inexact!—Don’t you yourself feel how wrong it is?

  Finally the hearing is resumed (all that is quite stripped of detail and argumentation), Werner’s lawyer takes the stand, and Mr. Flaubert tells us that when he turns toward the magistrate he makes, each time, “such a profound bow that he was like a deacon leaving the altar.” That there were such lawyers, even at the Paris bar, “kneeling,” as the author says, before the court and the public prosecutor, is quite possible. But there are other kinds also—this, Mr. Flaubert does not want to know—and it wasn’t so long ago that we heard the estimable Chaix d’Est-Ange (whose published speeches have lost not indeed any of their impetus and wit, but only their forensic pertinence) proudly respond to a haughty summing-up by the public prosecutor: “Here, at the bar, the counsel for the prosecution and I are equal—except in talent!” That day, the amiable jurist who could not indeed find around him the atmosphere, the divine resonance of the last age of the Republic, could still, just like Cicero, shoot the golden arrow.

  But action, held back for a while, is spurred and hastened on. The defendant is introduced, and at first, upon seeing him, some people seem to yearn (always more guesswork!) for the wealth that would have allowed them to leave for distant lands with a once beloved woman, and escape to those hours the poet speaks of, that alone are worthy of being lived and in which one becomes inflamed sometimes for one’s whole life, vita dignior oetas! This piece, read out loud—although it lacks some of that feeling of sweet and authentic impressions, in which a Monselet, a Frédéric Soulié have indulged with much charm—seems adequately harmonious and vague: “They would have known the cry of petrels, the coming of the fog, the rocking of ships, the formation of clouds.” But, I ask you, what are petrels doing here? The author is again visibly starting to amuse himself—nay, we’ll use the word—to mystify us. We don’t need a degree in ornithology to know that the petrel is a very common bird on our shores, and that there is no need to invent the diamond and make a fortune just to meet one. A hunter who has often pursued it assures me that its cry has absolutely nothing special about it that could so strongly move someone hearing it. It is clear that the author had in mind only the felicity of the sentence. He decided the cry of the petrel would do the trick and so he quickly served it up to us. Mr. de Chateaubriand is the first person to have thus coaxed details added after the fact, and about whose truth he didn’t trouble much, to appear in a studied framework. But he, even in his slightest annotation, had the divine gift, the word that made the image appear life-sized, forever, in his insight and his description; he possessed, as Joubert said, the talisman of the Enchanter. O ye descendents of Atala, descendents of Atala, we find you everywhere today, even on anatomists’ dissection tables! Etc.

  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, haza
rded 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.