The Lemoine Affair (2 page)

The heat had become stifling, a bell chimed, some turtledoves took flight, and, the
windows having been closed by order of the presiding magistrate, a smell of dust spread.
He was old, with a clown’s face, wore a gown too narrow for his girth, and had pretensions
to wit; his twin sideburns, which a trace of tobacco stained, gave something ornamental
and vulgar to his entire person. Since the adjournment of the hearing was prolonged,
private exchanges started up; to enter into conversation, the irritable ones complained
out loud about the lack of air, and, when someone said he had recognized the Minister
of the Interior as the gentleman who was
going out, a reactionary sighed, “Poor France!” Taking an orange out of his pocket,
a black man won esteem, and, out of a desire for popularity, offered segments of it
on a newspaper to his neighbors, excusing himself: first to a clergyman, who stated
“he had never eaten anything so good; it is an excellent, refreshing fruit”; but a
dowager lady took on an offended air, forbade her daughters to accept anything “from
someone they didn’t know,” while other people, not knowing if the newspaper would
get to them, sought to strike up an attitude: several took out their watches, a lady
took off her hat. A parrot was mounted on it. Two young men were startled, would much
have liked to discover if the bird had been placed there as a souvenir or perhaps
out of some sort of eccentric taste. Already the wags were beginning to call out to
each other from one bench to the other, and the women, looking at their husbands,
were smothering their laughter in their handkerchiefs, when silence was restored,
the presiding magistrate seemed to be absorbed in sleeping, and Werner’s lawyer began
to utter his speech for the plaintiff. He started out with an emphatic tone, spoke
for two hours, seemed dyspeptic, and every time he said “Your Honor” collapsed into
such a profound bow that you would have thought he was a young woman in front of a
king, or a deacon leaving the altar. He was savage about Lemoine, but the elegance
of the phrases softened the harshness of the indictment. And his sentences followed
each other uninterruptedly, like the gush of a waterfall, like a ribbon unfurling.
At times, the monotony of his speech was such that
it could no longer be distinguished from silence, like a bell whose vibration persists,
like an echo becoming fainter. To conclude, he called to witness the portraits of
Presidents Grévy and Carnot, placed above the court; and everyone, raising his head,
observed that mildew had overtaken them in this official, unclean room that exhibited
our glories and smelled musty. A wide opening divided it down the middle, benches
were lined up to the foot of the dais; there was dust on the floor, spiders in the
corners of the ceiling, a rat in every hole, and it had to be aired out often because
of the closeness of the stove, which was sometimes even more foul-smelling. Lemoine’s
counsel was brief in his reply. But he had a southern accent, appealed to generous
passions, kept taking off his pince-nez. Listening to him, Nathalie felt that confusion
to which eloquence leads; a sweetness filled her and her heart heaving, the cambric
of her corsage fluttered, like a blade of grass by the edge of a fountain ready to
well up, like the plumage of a pigeon about to fly away. Finally the magistrate made
a sign, a murmuring rose up, two umbrellas fell down: they were going to hear the
defendant once again. All of a sudden the angry gestures of the crowd pointed him
out; why hadn’t he told the truth, and made the diamond, and patented his invention?
Everyone, even the poorest, could have—this was certain—made millions from it. They
could even see the money in front of them, with that violence of regret when you think
you possess what you mourn. And many abandoned themselves all over again to the loveliness
of the dreams they had fashioned,
when upon news of the discovery they had glimpsed the fortune, before being foiled
by the swindle.

For some, it had meant retiring from business, having a mansion on the Avenue du Bois,
influence at the Academy; and even a yacht that would have taken them in the summer
to cold countries—but not to the Pole, which is not without interest, but the food
there smells of oil, the twenty-four-hour day must bother your sleep, and also how
do you keep clear of the polar bears?

For some, millions were not enough; they would have played them all at once on the
stock market; and, buying shares at the lowest rate the day before they rose back
up—a friend would have let them know when—they could see their capital increase a
hundredfold in a few hours. Rich as Carnegie then, though they would take care not
to waste it on humanitarian utopias. (In any case, what’s the use? A billion shared
among all the French wouldn’t make one single person rich, it’s been calculated.)
But, leaving luxury to the vain, they would only seek comfort and influence, would
have themselves elected President of the Republic, Ambassador to Constantinople, would
have their bedrooms padded with cork that would deaden the sound of their neighbors.
They would not join the Jockey Club, having the correct opinion of the aristocracy.
A patent of nobility from the Pope attracted them more. Perhaps you could have a papal
title without paying. But then what would be the good of so many millions? In short,
they would augment the annual gift to the Pope while still blaming
the Church. What possible use can the Pope have for five million pieces of lacework,
while so many country priests are dying of hunger?

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.

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 portrayals, 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.