The Lemoine Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

Léon Daudet. Upon which, my word! Proust, forgetting the gratitude
     he owed Zola, sent him flying ten steps backwards with a pair of blows, and knocked
     him flat on his back. The next day they fought, but, despite the intervention of Ganderax,
     Proust was firmly opposed to any reconciliation.” And all of a sudden, in the clutter
     of the coffee cups being passed round, Lucien whispered in my ear, with a comic whine,
     this revelation: “Don’t you see, Monsieur de Goncourt, if even despite
La Fourmilière
I’m not aware of this fashion, it’s because I can
see
even the words people say, as if I were painting, in the
capture
of a nuance, with the same
sfumato
as Chanteloup’s Pagoda.” I left Lucien, my head all excited by this affair of the
     diamond and of suicide, as if spoonfuls of brain had just been poured into me. And
     on the staircase I met the new ambassador from Japan who, seeming ever so slightly
     freakish and
decadent
, making him resemble a samurai holding, above my folding Coromandel screen, the two
     pincers of a crayfish, graciously told me he had long been on assignment in the Honolulu
     Islands where reading our books, my brother’s and mine, was the only thing capable
     of tearing the natives away from the pleasures of caviar, a reading that was prolonged
     till very late at night, in one go, with interludes consisting only of chewing some
     cigars of thecountry that come encased in long glass tubes, which are supposed to protect them
     during the crossing from a certain distemper the sea gives them. And the minister
     confessed to me his taste for our books, admitting he had known in Hong Kong a very
     great lady there who had only two books on her night table:
La Fille Elisa
and
Robinson Crusoe
.
    22 December
.
    I awoke from my four o’clock siesta with the presentiment of some piece of bad news.
     I had dreamt that the tooth that had made me suffer so when Cruet pulled it out, five
     years ago, had grown in again. And straightway Pélagie came in, with this news brought
     by Lucien Daudet, news she hadn’t come to tell me earlier so as not to disturb my
     nightmare: Marcel Proust has not killed himself, Lemoine has invented nothing at all,
     is nothing but a conjurer who isn’t even very clever, a kind of Robert-Houdin with
     no hands. Just our luck! For once the present workaday, dull life had
taken on some artistry
, offered us a subject for a play! Facing Rodenbach, who was waiting for me to wake
     up, I was not able to contain my disappointment, though I recovered myself sufficiently
     to become animated, to give vent to some already-composed tirades that the false news
     of the discovery and of the suicide had inspired in me, false news that was more artistic,
truer
, than the too-optimistic and
public
outcome, an outcome à la Sarcey, which Lucien told Pélagie was the real one. As for
     me, it was nothingbut protest that I whispered for an hour to Rodenbach about the bad luck that has
     always pursued us, my brother and me, making the biggest events into the smallest,
     a people’s revolution into the sniffles of a stage prompter, so many obstacles raised
     against the forward progress of our works. Now this time the jeweler’s guild has to
     get mixed up in it! Then Rodenbach confessed to me the nub of his thinking, which
     is that December has always been unlucky for us, for my brother and me, a month that
     saw our pastimes brought to court, and the failure of
Henriette Maréchal
planned by the press, and the cold sore I had on my tongue the day before the only
     speech I ever had to give, a cold sore that made people say I hadn’t dared to speak
     at the tomb of Vallès, when I was the one who had asked to do so—a whole company of
     mischances that, this man from the artistic North that is Rodenbach said superstitiously,
     should make us avoid undertaking anything at all this month. Then, when I interrupted
     the cabbalistic theories of the author of
Bruges la Morte
so as