The name “Lemoine”—“Monk”—should not, however, give us the notion of one of those severe ecclesiastical attitudes that would have made Lemoine himself not at all susceptible to such poetically enchanting impressions. It was probably only a nickname, the kind many people have, perhaps a simple pet name that the reserved manners of the young scholar, with his life scarcely given over to worldly dissipations, had quite naturally brought to the lips of frivolous people. Besides, it seems to me that we should not attach much importance to these epithets, many of which seem to have been chosen by chance, probably to distinguish two people who might otherwise have been confused with each other. The slightest nuance, or some distinction that’s often completely irrelevant, suffices to identify the man. The simple epithet of senior, or junior, added to the same name, seemed sufficient. It is often a question in documents of that era of a certain Coquelin the Elder who seems to have been a kind of proconsular individual, perhaps a wealthy administrator like Crassus or Murena. Without any definite text allowing us to affirm that he served in person, he held a distinguished position in the order of the Legion of Honor, created expressly by Napoleon to reward military merit. This nickname of “the Elder” may have been given him to distinguish him from another Coquelin, an esteemed actor, called Coquelin the Younger, without our being able to discover whether there was in fact an actual difference in age between them. It seems they simply wanted to use that method to honor the distance that still existed at that time between the actor and the politician, the man who had performed civic responsibilities. Perhaps they quite simply wanted to avoid any confusion on the electoral lists.
… A society where beautiful women, where noblemen of high birth, adorn their bodies with real diamonds is condemned to irremediable coarseness. The worldly man, the man for whom the dry rationality, the entirely superficial brilliance provided by classical education, are enough, might take pleasure in it. Truly pure souls, minds passionately attached to the good and the true, would experience an unbearable sensation of suffocation in such a society. Such customs could exist in the past. We will not see them again. During Lemoine’s time, according to all appearances, they had long ago become obsolete. The dull collection of implausible stories which bears the title The Human Comedy by Balzac is perhaps the work neither of one single man nor of one single era. Yet his still unshaped style, his ideas all marked by an old-fashioned absolutism, allow us to place its publication at least two centuries before Voltaire. However, Mme de Beauséant, who, in these insipidly dry fictions, personifies the perfectly distinguished woman, already shows scorn for the wives of nouveau riche businessmen appearing in public adorned with precious stones. It is probable that in Lemoine’s day a woman anxious to please was content to add some leaves to her hair where some dewdrop still trembled, as sparkling as the rarest diamond. In the cento of disparate poems entitled Songs of the Streets and the Woods, which is commonly attributed to Victor Hugo, although it is probably a little later than that, the words “diamonds” and “pearls” are used indiscriminately to portray the glittering of drops of water gushing from a murmuring spring, sometimes from a simple shower. In a kind of erotic little romance that recalls the Song of Songs, the bride says in so many words to the Husband that she wants no other diamonds than the drops of dew. Probably it is a question here of a generally accepted custom, not of an individual preference. This last hypothesis is, moreover, excluded in advance by the perfect banality of these little pieces that have been ascribed to the name of Hugo by virtue no doubt of the same desire for publicity that must have made Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) decide to adorn his spiritual maxims with the respected name of Solomon, who was much in vogue at that time.
Moreover, if they find out tomorrow how to make a diamond, I will undoubtedly be one of the least likely people to attach much importance to it. That has a lot to do with my education. I had scarcely reached the age of forty, when at the public meetings of the Society of Jewish Studies, I met some of the people liable to be strongly impressed by news of such a discovery. At Tréguier, with my first masters, then later on at Issy, at Saint-Sulpice, this news would have been met with the most extreme indifference, perhaps with an ill-concealed scorn. Whether or not Lemoine found a way to make diamonds, we cannot imagine how little that would have affected my sister Henriette, my uncle Pierre, M. Le Hir, or M. Carbon. At bottom, I have always remained on this point, as well as on many others, an old-fashioned disciple of Saint Tudual and Saint Colomban. This has often led me to utter, in all things having to do with luxury, unforgivably naïve remarks. At my age, I would not even be capable of going to buy a ring at a jeweler’s. Ah! It’s not in our Trégorrois that young ladies receive from their fiancés, like the Shulamite, strings of pearls, expensive necklaces set with silver, “vermiculata argento.” For me, the only precious stones that would still be capable of making me leave the Collège de France, despite my rheumatism, and take to the sea, but only if one of my old Breton saints consented to take me out on his apostolic bark, are the ones the fishermen in Saint-Michel-en-Grève sometimes glimpse at the bottom of the sea during fair weather, where the city of Ys used to stand, set in the stained-glass windows of its hundred drowned cathedrals.
… No doubt cities like Paris, London, Paris-Plage, Bucharest, will look less and less like the city that appeared to the presumed author of the Fourth Gospel, the city built of emerald, jacinth, beryl, chrysoprase, and other precious stones, with twelve doors each formed from a single fine pearl. But living in such a city would soon make us yawn with boredom, and who knows if the incessant contemplation of a setting like the one in which John’s Apocalypse unfolds might risk making the universe perish suddenly from a brainstorm? More and more the fundabo te in saphiris et ponam jaspidem propugnacula tua et omnes terminus tuos in lapides desiderabiles will appear to us as a simple figure of speech, like a promise kept for the last time at St. Mark’s in Venice. It is clear that if he supposed he ought not deviate from the principles of urban architecture according to Revelation, and if he meant to apply to the letter the Fundamentum primum calcedonius …, duodecimum amethystus, then my eminent friend M. Bouvard would risk postponing indefinitely the continuation of Boulevard Haussmann.