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Taking Stock Of Proust

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By ROBERT HILFERTY

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 9, 2008

"The Lemoine Affair," by Marcel Proust (Melville House, $10)

A hundred years ago French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) lost money in the stock market, too. And as he would in the epic "In Search of Lost Time," he converted the stuff of life into art.

His book "Pastiches et melanges," translated for the first time into English by Charlotte Mandell under the title "The Lemoine Affair," contains a series of newspaper pieces Proust wrote about a diamond scandal that rocked Paris. Hardly straight news articles, each parodies a major French writer, such as Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert.

A Parisian engineer named Henri Lemoine claimed to have invented a method of manufacturing diamonds from coal. He convinced the London-based president of the De Beers diamond empire, Sir Julius Wernher, to underwrite the process. The executive invested about a million francs before the fraud emerged.

After De Beers stock plummeted because of the scandal, Lemoine bought shares expecting to profit when the stock recovered. The ruse was discovered, and Wernher sued Lemoine, who was tried and imprisoned in 1908.

Proust had inherited De Beers stock from his parents and fretted that the scandal would erode his portfolio. At the same time, he was inspired by the literary potential of Lemoine's intrigue and hit upon an ingenious way to retell it - that's the true alchemy here.

He discussed different aspects of the scandal in a series of comic pastiches that appeared in Le Figaro newspaper. They were published five years before "Swann's Way," the first novel of "In Search of Lost Time," when the writer was 36.

In his pastiche of the Goncourt brothers, whose 19th entury "Journals" recorded the high and low doings of literary Paris, he contrives his own obit: "Marcel Proust killed himself after the fall in diamond shares, a collapse that annihilated a part of his fortune."

The parodies showcased Proust's wit and mastery of diverse styles. Even when he's aping less-familiar writers - such as Jules Michelet, Charles A. Sainte-Beuve and Ernest Renan - Proust's shifting perspective on the scandal and stylistic virtuosity remain entertaining.

In his Balzac spin, he brings into play characters from "The Human Comedy," most appropriately German banker Baron de Nucingen, who greedily remarks upon hearing about the so-called secret of making diamonds, "Diz bizness is eine great dreasure."

This segues into flawless faux Flaubert: "Everyone, even the poorest, could have - this was certain - made millions from it. And many abandoned themselves all over again to the loveliness of the dreams they had fashioned, when upon the news of the discovery they had glimpsed the fortune, before being foiled by the swindle."

Next comes a hilarious review of Flaubert's supposed novel about the affair by literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who pans the book passionately.

Edmund White, in his short Penguin Lives biography of Proust, says the writer enjoyed imitating the styles of writers he admired excessively "so that he could be in conscious control of their influence on him and, in a sense, 'exorcise' their impact on his prose."

Proust soon found his own voice, beginning with the famous first sentence of his monumental work: "For a long time, I used to go to bed early."

Robert Hilferty is a critic for Bloomberg News.

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