“Prestige of a Momentary Diamond”: Economies of Distinction in Proust

The essay examines Proust’s involvement in the “Lemoine Affair,” a diamond-fabrication scam that captured the French popular imagination in 1908. Lemoine’s hoax inspired Proust to undertake his own virtuosic exercise in fraud: in the year before he began drafting In Search of Lost Time, he published a series of pastiches in the newspaper— fictional accounts of the affair written in the styles of Balzac, Flaubert, Michelet, and others. These pastiches highlight Proust’s penchant for newspapers, magic tricks, and ventriloquistic play. Experiments in the phenomenology of “convulsive” and “unstable” preciosity, they reveal Proust’s fascination with the volatility of value and the peculiar status of the aesthetic object in modernity.