The Lemoine Case

Proust's L'Affaire Lemoine is a series of literary imitations written around 1908-1909 and later collected in Pastiches et mélanges (1919). Each piece recounts the same real-life scandal – Henri Lemoine's fraudulent 1908 claim to have discovered how to manufacture diamonds – but written in the distinct style of major French authors like Flaubert, Balzac, Sainte-Beuve, Michelet, Renan, and the Goncourt brothers. Proust meticulously replicates each writer's vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, and characteristic obsessions. This exercise went beyond parody; it was a deep study of literary mechanics, revealing Proust's exceptional ability to dissect and inhabit another author's voice, exposing their underlying worldview through stylistic mimicry alone.

The work exposes Proust's view of writing as a deeply personal, almost solipsistic act. The unchanging core event becomes secondary, entirely reshaped by the filter of each imitated author's consciousness. Reality, in these pages, is malleable, existing only as refracted through a specific stylistic and temperamental lens. This emphasis suggests a world where objective truth is inaccessible, replaced by multiple, self-contained subjective realities. The choice of a fraud case – built on illusion and exposed artifice – as the subject matter reinforces this sense of pervasive unreliability. While playful, the pastiches collectively point towards a potential nihilism concerning fixed meaning; if the same facts can be rendered so differently, each version equally valid within its stylistic universe, what stable truth remains? The exercise underscores language's power to create worlds, but also its power to isolate the self within its own constructions.

The book also offers a critical perspective on the mood of early twentieth-century France, a society eager for quick profit and novel marvels after the Dreyfus affair and before the war. Proust’s refusal to anchor the story to a single moral line points to the soft relativism that modern Paris was beginning to accept. Yet, the very act of parody hints at a lingering wish for shared standards since comedy loses its bite once every yardstick is gone. The result is a brief, witty work that asks how much weight style carries in shaping what readers call reality and whether a game of changing masks leaves anything solid behind.

This critical reader’s edition presents a modern translation of the original manuscript, crafted for the contemporary reader with lucid language and streamlined sentences that illuminate Proust’s intricate French syntax and period‑specific allusions. Supplementary material enriches the text with autobiographical, historical, and linguistic context, including an afterword by the translator on Proust’s personal history, cultural impact, and intellectual legacy, an index of the philosophical concepts he weaves—highlighting his explorations of memory, time, and the influence of Henri Bergson—a comprehensive chronological list of his published writings, and a detailed timeline of his life, emphasizing the friendships and social circles that shaped his artistic vision.