Patience, then! Humanity, patience. Rekindle tomorrow the furnace that has already gone out a thousand times whence the diamond might one day emerge! With a good humor that the Eternal can envy in you, perfect the crucible where you will make carbon rise to temperatures unknown to Lemoine and Bertholet. Tirelessly repeat the sto ad ostium et pulso, without knowing if a voice will ever reply: Veni, veni, coronaberis. Your story has now entered a path from which the stupid fantasies of the vain and the aberrant will never contrive to make you stray. The day Lemoine, by an exquisite play on words, called simple drops of water valuable only in their freshness and limpidity “precious stones,” the cause of idealism was won forever. He did not make a diamond: he made the price of an ardent imagination, of perfect simplicity of heart, incontestable — things important in other ways for the future of the planet. They will lose their value only on the day that a deeper knowledge of cerebral localizations and the progress of brain surgery allow us easily to set in motion the infinitely delicate mechanisms that awaken modesty and an innate sense of beauty. On that day, the free thinker, the man who has a high idea of virtue, would see the value on which he placed all his hopes undergo an irresistible movement of depreciation. Surely the believer who hopes to exchange a virtue he bought cheaply with indulgences for a share of eternal felicities, is desperately attached to an untenable proposition. But it is clear the virtue of the free thinker would scarcely be worth anything at all the day it becomes merely the compulsory result of the success of an intracranial operation.
Men of a given era see among the various personalities who by turns seek out public attention all sorts of differences that they think are enormous, yet that posterity will not notice. We are all rough drafts where the genius of one epoch is prelude to a masterpiece that it will probably never execute. For us, between two personalities like the honorable M. Denys Cochin and Lemoine, the dissimilarities leap to the eye. They might perhaps escape the Seven Sleepers, if they awoke a second time from the sleep they fell into in the reign of the Emperor Decius which was thought to last a scant three hundred seventy-two years. The Messianic point of view can no longer be our own. Less and less does the privation of some gift or other of the mind seem to us to deserve the wonderful curses it inspired in the unknown author of the Book of Job. “Compensation”—this word, which dominates Emerson’s philosophy, could well be the last word of all sound judgment, the judgment of the true agnostic. The Comtesse de Noailles, if she is the author of the poems attributed to her, left an extraordinary work, a hundred times superior to Qoheleth, or to Béranger’s songs. But what a false position that must have given her in society! She seems, moreover, to have understood this perfectly and to have led in the country, perhaps not without some ennui,3 an entirely simple, retired life, in the little orchard that usually serves as her interlocutor. The excellent singer Polin might perhaps be a little lacking in metaphysics; but he possesses a quality that is a thousand times more precious and which neither the son of Sirach nor Jeremiah ever knew: a delicious joviality, exempt from the slightest trace of affectation, etc.
1 Trial, Volume II passim, see especially “country,” etc.
2 Some of those deliciously naïve songs have been preserved for us. It is generally a scene borrowed from daily life that the singer gaily recounts. The words of “Zizi Panpan,” by themselves, which are almost always cut off at regular intervals, bring nothing but a rather vague sense to the mind. It was probably pure rhythmic indications supposed to mark the measure for an ear that would otherwise have been tempted to forget it, perhaps even simply an admiring exclamation, uttered upon seeing Juno’s bird, as these often-repeated words les plumes de paon (the peacock’s feathers) would tend to have us think, which follow them without much pause.
3 We may wonder if this exile was indeed voluntary, and if we should not rather see in it one of those decisions of authority similar to the one that prevented Mme de Staël from returning to France, perhaps because of some law, the text of which has not reached us, and which forbade women from writing. The exclamations repeated a thousand times in these poems with such monotonous insistence: “Ah! To leave! Ah! To leave! To take the train that whistles as it rushes onward!” (Occident.) “Let me go, let me go.” (Tumulte dans l’aurore.) “Ah! Let me leave.” (Les héros.) “Ah! To return to my city, to see the Seine flow within its noble banks. To say to Paris: I’m on my way, I’ll be back, I’m coming!” etc., show clearly that she was not free to take the train. Some verses where she seems to be adapting to her solitude: “What if already my sky is too divine for me,” etc., have obviously been added afterwards to try to disarm the authorities’ suspicions by a semblance of submission.
IX IN THE MEMOIRS OF SAINT-SIMON
Wedding of Talleyrand-Périgord. — Successes won by the Imperials at Château-Thierry, exceedingly inferior. — Le Moine, by La Mouchi, is introduced to the Regent. — Conversation I had with M. the Duc d’Orléans on this subject. He is resolved to bring up the affair with the Duc de Guiche. — Fantasies of the Murats on the rank of foreign prince. — Conversation of the Duc de Guiche with M. the Duc d’Orléans on Le Moine, at the parvulo given at Saint-Cloud for the King of England traveling incognito in France. — Unprecedented presence of the Comte de Fels at this parvulo. — Journey to France of an Infante of Spain, very remarkable.
That year took place the wedding of good lady Blumenthal with L. de Talleyrand-Périgord, who has been mentioned many times in the course of these Memoirs, with emphatic and well-deserved praise. The Rohans hosted the wedding, which was attended by people of quality. He did not want his wife to remain seated during the wedding, but she presumed to use a slipcover on her chair and incontinently had herself addressed as Duchess of Montmorency, which did not advance her in the least. The campaign continued against the Imperials who despite the revolts in Hungary caused by the high price of bread won some successes at Château-Thierry. It was there that for the first time we saw the impropriety of M. de Vendôme, publicly called “Highness.” The scourge reached even the Murats, and did not fail to cause me anxieties against which I kept up my spirits only with difficulty, so that I had gone far from the court, to spend the Easter fortnight at La Ferté in the company of a gentleman who had served in my regiment and was highly regarded by the late King, when on the eve of Low Sunday a letter that Mme de Saint-Simon sent advised me to go to Meudon as quickly as possible for an important affair concerning M. the Duc d’Orléans. At first I thought it was a matter of the affair of the false Marquis de Ruffec, which has been noted in its place; but Biron had skimmed it, and from a few words Mme de Saint-Simon dropped, about gems and some rogue named Le Moine, I was quite certain that it was not one more problem of those alembics that, without the influence I exercised with the chancellor, had been so close to getting — I scarcely dare write it — M. the Duc d’Orléans locked up in the Bastille. We do in fact know that this unfortunate prince, having no true or extensive knowledge about births, family histories, or what truth there might be in pretensions, the absurdity that bursts forth from some people and lets the bedrock be glimpsed which is nothing at all, the brilliance of marriages and offspring, even less the art of distinguishing in his courtesy between higher and lower rank, or of charming others with the obliging word that shows one knows what is the real and enduring, dare I say, intrinsecum of genealogies, this prince had never learned how to enjoy himself at court, had therefore seen himself abandoned by what he had first turned away from, to such an extent that he had fallen, although a first-rate prince of the blood, to immersing himself in chemistry, in painting, in the Opera, the musicians from which often came to bring him their scores and their violins which held no secrets for him. We also saw with what pernicious art his enemies, and above all the Maréchal de Villeroy, had used his taste for chemistry against him, so out of place, during the strange death of the Dauphin and the Dauphine. Far from the frightful rumors that had been spread at the time with pernicious cleverness by anyone who came close to the Maintenon causing M. the Duc d’Orléans to repent of researches that were so little suited to a man of his breeding, we saw that on the contrary he went on pursuing them with Mirepoix, every night, in the quarries of Montmartre, working on coal that he heated with a blowtorch, where, by a contradiction that can be conceived of only as Providence’s chastisement of this prince, he drew an abominable glory from not believing in God and confessed to me more than once that he had hoped to see the devil.