The Lemoine Affair

Their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself after the fall in diamond shares, a collapse that annihilated a part of his fortune.

This is the first-ever translation into English of this startling tour-de-force by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

The Lemoine Affair was inspired by the real-life French scandal involving Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal and convinced numerous people — including officers of the De Beers diamond mine company and Proust himself — to invest in the scheme. In a series of pastiches — imitations written in the style of other writers — Proust tells the story of the embarrassment rippling across high society Paris in the wake of the scandal, poking fun at himself (in one story, a character declares that Marcel Proust is so embarrassed he’s suicidal) while lampooning some of France’s greatest writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Saint-Simon.

Full of sophisticated wit and dazzling wordplay, and rife with allusions to his friend and fictional characters, many Proust scholars see the dead-on mimicry of The Lemoine Affair—written soon after Proust’s rejection of society life — as the work by which he honed his own unique, masterly voice.