The Lemoine Affair Read Free Page B

man …” Traveler! You use only words of truth, of “objectivity,”
     you make a profession of it, you make a display of it; but, beneath this self-styled
     impersonality, how quickly we can recognize you, even if it’s only from this black
     man, this orange, that parrot just now, who have just disembarked with you, all these
     accessories you have
brought back
with you that you hurry to
slap
onto your sketch—the most variegated, I declare,and the least authentic, the least lifelike one your brush has ever struggled with.
    So the black man takes an orange out of his pocket, and by doing so, he “wins esteem”!
     Mr. Flaubert, I understand, means that in a crowd someone who can put himself to use
     and who shows off some advantage, even an ordinary one familiar to everyone—someone
     who takes out a goblet, for example, when someone else is drinking out of a bottle
     next to him; or a newspaper, if he is the only one who thought to buy one—that this
     person is immediately singled out, noticed and pointed out by others. But confess
     that when it comes down to it you don’t mind, by risking this unusual and out of place
     expression of “winning esteem,” insinuating that all esteem, even the highest and
     most sought-after, is not much more than that, that it is made of envy inspired by
     possessions that are at bottom without any intrinsic value. Well, we say to Mr. Flaubert,
     that is not true; esteem—and we know that the example will touch you, since it is
     only in literature that you belong to the school of insensitivity, of
impassivity
—is acquired by a whole life devoted to science, to humanity. Literature, once upon
     a time, could procure it also, when it was only the gauge and so to speak the flower
     of the mind’s urbanity, of that entirely human disposition that can indeed have its
     predilections and its goals, but that allows, alongside images of vice and ridicule,
     those of innocence and virtue. Without going back to the ancients (who were much more
     “naturalist” than you will ever be, but who, on the painting we see in its material
     frame, always make a fullydivine ray of light appear clearly, as if it were in the open air, which shines its
     light on the pediment and illumines the contrast), without going back to them, whether
     they go by the name of Homer or Moschus, Bion or Leonidas of Tarentum, not to mention
     more deliberate portrayals, tell us if you please, is this something different from
     what these same writers have always done, writers you do not fear to claim as your
     own? Saint-Simon above all, next to the atrocious and slanderous portraits of a Noailles
     or a Harlay, what great brushstrokes doesn’t he use to show us, in its light and its
     proportion, the virtue of a Montal, a Beauvilliers, a Rancé, a Chevreuse? And even
     in that “Human Comedy,” or the one so called, where Mr. de Balzac, with an almost
     mocking conceit, claims to outline “scenes” (actually entirely fabulous) “of Parisian
     and provincial life” (he, a man incapable of observation if ever there was one), compared
     with and almost making up for the Hulots, the Philippe Bridaus, the Balthazar Claes,
     as he calls them, and of whom your Narr’Havas and your Shahabarims have no reason
     to be envious, I admit, hasn’t he imagined an Adeline Hulot, a Blanche de Mortsauf,
     a Marguerite de Solis?
    Indeed, it would have astonished, and rightly so, the Jacquemonts, the Darus, the
     Mérimées, the Ampères, all those men of delicacy and scholarship who knew him so well
     and who did not think there was any need, for such a trifle, to make so many bells
     ring out, if someone had told them that the witty Stendhal, to whom we owe so many
     clear and fruitful views, so many apposite remarks, would pass as a novelist in our
     day. But finally,he is even
truer
than you are! And there is more reality in the smallest study by—I’ll say Sénac or
     Meilhan, by Ramond or Althon Shée—than