The Lemoine Affair, by Henri de Régnier
The diamond affords me little
pleasure. I find no beauty in it. The little that it adds to the
beauty of human faces is less an effect of its own than a reflection
of theirs. It has neither the marine transparency of emerald, nor
the boundless azure of sapphire. I prefer the sorrel light of
topaz, but more than anything the crepuscular charm of opal. They
are emblematic and two-fold. If moonlight irisates one half of
their face, the other seems tinged with the flaming pinks and
green shades of sunset. We are not attracted so much by the
colours that they present to us as by the dreams that they instil
in us. To those who know nothing outside of themselves other than
the shape of their destiny, they display an alternate and silent
face.
There were a large number of them in the town
where Hermas took me. The house in which we were living was more
commendable for the beauty of its position than for its human
comforts. The perspective of the horizon was better arranged, but
the layout of the premises was not well considered. It was more
agreeable to dream there than it was to sleep. It was more
picturesque than comfortable. Overcome by the heat of the day,
peacocks would let out their fateful and quizzical cries
throughout the night, which, to tell the truth, is more
propitious for reverie than favourable for sleep. The noise of
the church bells prevented one from finding any in the morning,
for lack of that which one can only enjoy before daylight, a
second which repairs at least to a certain extent the fatigue of
being denied the first. The grandeur of the ceremonies for which
their chimes announce the hour compensate little for the
inconvenience of being awoken at that time when it is more
agreeable to be sleeping, if one wishes to be able to profit from
the later ones. The only solution was to quit the linen
bedclothes and the feather pillow and to go and take a walk
around the house. To tell the truth, if there was any charm to be
had from this enterprise there was also an element of danger. It
was amusing but not without peril. Sometimes we prefer to forego
the pleasure of it rather than go through with an adventure. The
floorboards that M. de Séryeuse had brought back from the isles
were multicoloured and uneven, slippery and geometrical. The
design of the lozenge shapes, sometimes red, sometimes black,
offered a more pleasant spectacle to the eye but the woodwork, at
some points too high, at others broken down, did not guarantee
secure footing for a stroll.
The pleasures that could be taken in the
courtyard did not have to be obtained at such risk. We would go
down around midday. The sun would have warmed the paving stones
or the rain would have sprinkled the roof tiles. From time to
time the weathercock would creak in the wind. In front of the
closed door a sculpted Hermes, monumental and green with age,
added the shape of his caduceus to the shadow he projected. The
whirling dead leaves of the neighbouring trees fell around his
heels and curled their wings of gold around his wings of marble.
Votive and pot-bellied, doves would come and perch in the
archivolt or on the embrasure of the pedestal, frequently letting
fall an unsavoury ball, scaly and grey. It would splatter its
intermittent and grainy mass down onto the gravel or on the turf,
making the grass sticky with it and making itself plentiful on
the lawn and which there was no lack of on the walkway of what M.
de Séryeuse referred to as his garden.
Lemoine often came to stroll around it.
It was there that I saw him for the first time.
He appeared rather bedecked in a workman's smock with a doctor's
cap on his head. Yet the rogue claimed to be him and to be
involved in various sciences in which it is more profitable to
succeed but in which it is often not prudent to devote oneself
to.
It was midday when his carriage arrived,
describing a circle in front of the steps to the house. The
paving stones rang with the sound of the horses' hooves, a
footman ran up to the carriage step. In the street women crossed
themselves. The North wind blew. At the foot of the marble Hermes
its caducean shadow took on a fugitive and sullen aspect. It
seemed to be laughing as it was badgered by the wind. The church
bells rang. Between the bronze peals of the great bell a carillon
would venture its syncopated choreography of crystal. In the
garden a swing creaked. Dry seeds were spread out on the sundial.
By turns the sun blazed or hid. Turned to agate by the light, the
Hermes of the threshold grew darker from the sun's disappearance
than it had been during its absence. Successive and ambiguous the
Marmorean countenance endured. A smile seemed to elongate the
expiatory lips into the shape of a caduceus. An odour of osier,
pumice-stone, Cineraria and marquetry escaped from the closed
Venetian shutters of the water-closet and through the partly
opened door of the vestibule. It made the tedium of the hour more
oppressive. M. de Séryeuse and Lemoine continued chatting on the
entrance steps. We heard an ambiguous and sharp noise like a
burst of furtive laughter. It was the gentleman's sword which was
knocking against the alchemical glass retort. The feathered hat
of the one offered more protection against the wind than the silk
head-kerchief of the other. Lemoine had a cold. A little snot had
dropped from his nose which he had neglected to blow, onto his
collar and his coat. Its viscous and lukewarm little stone had
slid over the linen of the one, but had adhered to the cloth of
the other and remained suspended above the void in a silvery and
fluid fringe as it fell in drops. As the sunlight shone through
the drops it confused together the slimy mucus and the watery
liquid. One could no longer make out anything but one single
juicy, convulsive, transparent and slowly hardening mass; and in
its ephemeral refulgence with which it was decorating Lemoine's
coat, it seemed to have immobilized in its presence the illusion
of a momentary diamond, still hot, if I may say so, from the
furnace from which it had emerged, for which this unstable jelly,
corrosive and lively - as it had become once more for a moment -
seemed all at once, through its deceitful and fascinating beauty,
to represent both its mockery and its symbol.
Article appeared in Le Figaro, 6 March 1909 and reprinted in Pastiches et Mélanges (Libraire Gallimard, 1919).