Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec Read Free Book Online Page B

pharmaceutical stores.
    Dr Dinteville sits at his table writing a prescription with a look of complete indifference. He is a man of about forty, almost bald, with an egg-shaped head. His patient is an old woman. She is about to get down from the examining couch where she has been lying, and is adjusting the brooch which holds her blouse together: a metal lozenge inscribed with a stylised fish.
    A third person is seated on the divan; he is a man of mature years, wearing a leather jacket and a wide check scarf with fringed edging.
    The Dintevilles are descended from a Post Master knighted by Louis XIII for the help he gave Luynes and Vitry at the time of Concini’s murder. Cadignan has left us this striking portrait of a character who seems to have been an uncommonly rough old trooper:
     
D’Inteville was of middling stature, neither too big nor too small, and his nose was somewhat aquiline, the shape of a razor handle. At that time he was thirty-five or thereabouts, and about as fit for gilding as a lead dagger. He was a very proper-looking fellow, but for the fact that he was a bit of a lecher and naturally subject to a malady that was called at that time “the lack of money, pain incomparable!” However he had sixty-three ways of finding it at a pinch, the commonest and most honest of which was by means of cunningly perpetrated larceny. He was a mischievous rogue, a cheat, a boozer, a roysterer, and a vagabond if there ever was one in Paris, but otherwise the best fellow in the world; and he was always preparing some trick against the sergeants and the watch.
    His descendants were generally less wild and gave France a dozen or score of bishops and cardinals, as well as various other remarkable characters, of whom the following are particularly worthy of note:
    Gilbert de Dinteville (1774–1796): a fervent Republican, he enlisted at the age of seventeen and rose to be a colonel in three years. He led his battalion in the attack on Montenotte. This heroic gesture cost him his life but ensured the successful outcome of the battle.
    Emmanuel de Dinteville (1810–1849): a friend of Liszt and Chopin, known particularly as the composer of a waltz, fittingly entitled The Spinning Top .
    François de Dinteville (1814–1867): came top in the final examination at the Ecole Polytechnique at the age of seventeen, spurned the brilliant career he could have had in engineering or in industry, and devoted himself to research. In 1840 he believed he had discovered the secret of making diamonds from coal. On the basis of what he dubbed “crystal duplication theory”, he succeeded in making a carbon-saturated solution crystallise by cooling. The Academy of Sciences, to which he submitted his samples, declared his experiment interesting, but inconclusive, since the diamonds obtained were dull, brittle, easily scored by a fingernail, and sometimes even friable. This refutation didn’t deter Dinteville from patenting his method, nor from publishing, between 1840 and his death, thirty-four original articles and technical reports on the subject. Ernest Renan mentions his case in one of his chronicles ( Miscellany, 47, passim ): “ Had Dinteville truly manufactured diamond, he would thereby no doubt have pandered, in some measure, to that crude materialism which must now be reckoned with evermore by any man who makes so bold as to concern himself with the business of humanity; to souls aspiring to the ideal, he would have given nary a molecule of that exquisite spirituality upon which we have lived so long, and do still .”
    Laurelle de Dinteville (1842–1861) was one of the unfortunate victims and probably the cause of one of the most horrible news stories of the Second Empire. During a reception given by the Duke of Crécy-Couvé, whom she was to have married a few weeks later, the young lady drank a toast to her future in-laws, emptying her champagne glass in a single draught, and then flung the glass in the air. Fate determined that