The Lemoine Affair

For this event, Mitch will lead the discussion of Proust’s The Lemoine Affair, a brief, comic work written shortly before Proust began the not-so-brief ISOLT.

The Lemoine Affair is a collection of nine pastiches, each written in the style of a different writer, including Balzac, Flaubert, Saint-Simon, Sainte-Beuve, and others. Each pastiche gives a different perspective of l’affaire Lemoine, where Henri Lemoine, between the years 1905-1909, defrauded the De Beers company and other investors of almost 2M francs by claiming–then demonstrating (in the buff no less)–a technique to fabricate diamonds out of coal.

Proust was one of the investors who lost money.

The physical book is hard to find, so we will be using the digital version from Amazon.