“Madame, they have just discovered the secret of making diamonds.”
“Dis bizness is eine grreat dreasure,” the Baron exclaimed, dazzled.
“But I thought they always made them,” Léontine naively replied.
Mme de Cadignan, as a woman of taste, took care not to say a word, whereas bourgeois ladies would have launched into a conversation where they would have inanely flaunted their knowledge of chemistry. But Mme de Sérizy had still not finished that phrase that revealed an incredible ignorance, when Diane, lavishing her whole attention on the Countess, assumed a sublime look. Only Raphael might have been capable of painting it. And indeed, if he had succeeded, he would have given us a counterpart to his famous Fornarina, the most prominent of his canvases, the only one that places him above Andrea del Sarto in the esteem of connoisseurs.
To understand the drama that is about to unfold, and to which the scene we have just related may serve as prologue, a few words of explanation are necessary. At the end of the year 1905, a fearful tension reigned in the relationships between France and Germany. Either because Wilhelm II was actually planning to declare war on France, or because he just wanted to give that impression in order to break our alliance with England, the German ambassador received the order to announce to the French government that he was going to present his letters of recall. The kings of finance speculated then on a drop in the market, coming on news of an imminent mobilization. Considerable sums were lost in the stock exchange. For one whole day they sold government bonds that the banker Nucingen, secretly alerted by his friend the minister de Marsay of the resignation of the chancellor Delcassé, which people in Paris didn’t hear about until around four o’clock, bought back at a ludicrous price and has kept ever since.
Even Raoul Nathan believed in the war, although Florine’s lover, because du Tillet, whose sister-in-law he had wanted to seduce (see A Daughter of Eve), had given him a bad steer on the stock market, advocated peace at any price in his newspaper.
France was saved from a disastrous war then only by the intervention, of which for a long time historians have been unaware, of the Maréchal de Montcornet, the strongest man of his century after Napoleon. Even Napoleon was unable to execute his plan of landing in England, the master idea of his reign. Napoleon, Montcornet — isn’t there a kind of mysterious resemblance between these two names? I should be careful not to say that they are linked to each other by some occult bond. Perhaps our era, after having doubted all great things without trying to understand them, will be forced to return to the pre-established harmony of Leibniz. What’s more, the man who was then at the head of the most colossal diamond business in England was named Werner, Julius Werner — Werner! Doesn’t this name seem to you strangely to evoke the Middle Ages? Just hearing it, don’t you already see Dr. Faust, bending over his crucibles, with or without Marguerite? Doesn’t it imply the idea of the philosopher’s stone? Werner! Julius! Werner! Change two letters and you have Werther. Werther is by Goethe.
Julius Werner used Lemoine, one of those extraordinary men who, if they are guided by a favorable fate, will be called Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Charlemagne, Berthollet, Spalanzani, Volta. Change the circumstances and they will end up like the Maréchal d’Ancre, Balthazar Cleas, Pugachev, Le Tasse, the Comtesse de la Motte or Vautrin. In France, the patent the government grants inventors has no value of its own. That is where we should seek the cause that is paralyzing the whole vast industrial enterprise in our country. Before the Revolution, the Séchards, giants of printing, still used wooden presses in Angoulême, and the Cointet brothers hesitated to buy the second printing patent. (See Lost Illusions.) In fact, few people understood the answer Lemoine made to the policemen who had come to arrest him. “What? Would Europe abandon me?” the false inventor had exclaimed with profound terror. The remark bandied about that evening in the salons of the government minister Rastignac passed unnoticed.
“Has that man gone mad?” the Comte de Granville said, surprised.
The former clerk of the attorney Bordin was supposed to take the stand in this case in the name of the public prosecutor’s department, having recently recovered, through the marriage of his second daughter to the banker du Tillet, the favorable consideration from the new government that his alliance with the Vandenesses had made him lose, etc.
II THE “LEMOINE AFFAIR” BY GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
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.