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Pages from the Goncourt Journals
No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers Goncourt
The journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature, a work that in its richness of color, variety, and seemingly casual perfection bears comparison with the great paintings of their friends and contemporaries the Impressionists.
Born nearly ten years apart into a French aristocratic family, the two brothers formed an extraordinarily productive and enduring literary partnership, collaborating on novels, criticism, and plays that pioneered the new aesthetic of naturalism. But the brothers’ talents found their most memorable outlet in their journal, which is at once a chronicle of an era, an intimate glimpse into their lives, and the purest expression of a nascent modern sensibility preoccupied with sex and art, celebrity and self-exposure. The Goncourts visit slums, brothels, balls, department stores, and imperial receptions; they argue over art and politics and trade merciless gossip with and about Hugo, Baudelaire, Degas, Flaubert, Zola, Rodin, and many others. And in 1871, Edmond maintains a vigil as his brother dies a slow and agonizing death from syphilis, recording every detail in the journal that he would continue to maintain alone for another two decades.
The journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature, a work that in its richness of color, variety, and seemingly casual perfection bears comparison with the great paintings of their friends and contemporaries the Impressionists.
Born nearly ten years apart into a French aristocratic family, the two brothers formed an extraordinarily productive and enduring literary partnership, collaborating on novels, criticism, and plays that pioneered the new aesthetic of naturalism. But the brothers’ talents found their most memorable outlet in their journal, which is at once a chronicle of an era, an intimate glimpse into their lives, and the purest expression of a nascent modern sensibility preoccupied with sex and art, celebrity and self-exposure. The Goncourts visit slums, brothels, balls, department stores, and imperial receptions; they argue over art and politics and trade merciless gossip with and about Hugo, Baudelaire, Degas, Flaubert, Zola, Rodin, and many others. And in 1871, Edmond maintains a vigil as his brother dies a slow and agonizing death from syphilis, recording every detail in the journal that he would continue to maintain alone for another two decades.
472 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1866
About the author
Edmond de Goncourt
650 books36 followersFrench writer and literary and art critic Edmond-Louis-Antoine Huot de Goncourt published books and founded the Académie Goncourt. His brother is Jules de Goncourt.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
July 21, 2014
Hands-down the most entertaining book I've read all year. You need this in your life if you have any interest at all in French literature, the life of the mind, the creative process, or Gallic bitching on a monumental scale. Especially the last one.
Every page, and I mean every page, of this book contains one or more of the following:
1. A perfectly-polished aphorism;
2. An astonishing anecdote about a famous writer, or painter, or member of royalty;
3. A worm's-eye view of some major historical event;
4. A jaw-dropping insight into the ubiquity of nineteenth-century misogyny
…or all four. The nature of the Goncourts' social circle means that even the most Twitter-like entry of daily banality becomes interesting (‘A ring at the door. It was Flaubert’), but more to the point there is so much here of the real life that never found its way into the fiction of the time. Reading this feels like finally finding out what all those characters in nineteenth-century novels, with their contrived misunderstandings and drawing-room spats, were really thinking about – the salacious concerns that lie behind all the printable novelistic metaphors. When the Goncourts and their famous friends get together for a chat, instead of just talking about who batted their eyelashes at whom last night, they are more likely to wax lyrical about
(An idea expressed in almost identical terms, incidentally, more than 150 years later in Nicholson Baker's The Fermata.) Or about their aversion to the ‘oriental practice’ of women shaving their pubic hair:
It is all amazing stuff. The Goncourts are alert to the best gossip, the most entertaining and revealing anecdotes; their keen sense that they are underappreciated geniuses drives a lot of their observations of the people around them who are (as they see it) getting the success that they, the Goncourts, deserve. This is lucky for us, because it keeps them deeply interested in the artists around them to the very end.
The most prominent of these is Zola, who first pops up in the journals as an unknown fan. His prodigious work ethic and knack for publicity soon means that he is getting all the glory, and all the money, of being the leader of the new ‘Naturalist’ movement. The Goncourts reckon, not without some reason, that he lifted most of his best ideas from them, and they duly note down all the examples they can find. But they're impressed despite themselves at how good he is with the press; as Zola cheerfully confesses,
The attitude of all concerned towards women is shocking, especially in the early years (Edmond does mature quite a lot towards the end, benefitting from a close and gossipy friendship with Princess Mathilde Bonaparte that was clearly very important to him). The women that get discussed tend to be gaupes ‘trollops’, gueuses ‘sluts’ or gadoues ‘whores’; sometimes translator Robert Baldick even renders filles ‘girls’ as ‘tarts’, which, given the tone, is not unreasonable. The brothers confess somewhere that neither of them has really been in love for more than a few days at a time, and their deepest emotion is always reserved for each other. Edmond's description of his brother's eventual death from syphilis is heart-breaking: ‘This morning he was unable to remember a single title among the books he has written.’
And death does loom pretty large over parts of the journal, which covers such upheavals as the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the suppression of the Commune – but the Goncourts' eye is always on individual responses, picturesque incident, personal idiosyncrasies.
Neither of them ever marries, although Edmond thinks about it a few times after his brother has gone. He tries to let down gently the few women that approach him. Eventually, in a passage that's somehow both creepy and moving, he confides that he's never really got over his first erotic experience as a young boy, when he was staying in his cousin's house:
The Journal amounts to an argument that what matters in life is sex, death and literature – only the characters illustrating this are not fictional creations but rather Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Degas, Barbey d'Aurevilley, Huysmans, Dumas, Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and Turgenev. It's not only glorious and life-affirming, it's also very moving because even while Edmond rages against how his literary works have been overlooked, the reader is increasingly aware that this journal is going to be everything that they hoped for their novels, and more.
A talent they obviously had. I would rather read half a page of the Goncourts on Zola than a hundred pages of Zola himself. Indeed right now I feel I'd rather read half a page of the Goncourts on anything than almost anything else.
Every page, and I mean every page, of this book contains one or more of the following:
1. A perfectly-polished aphorism;
2. An astonishing anecdote about a famous writer, or painter, or member of royalty;
3. A worm's-eye view of some major historical event;
4. A jaw-dropping insight into the ubiquity of nineteenth-century misogyny
…or all four. The nature of the Goncourts' social circle means that even the most Twitter-like entry of daily banality becomes interesting (‘A ring at the door. It was Flaubert’), but more to the point there is so much here of the real life that never found its way into the fiction of the time. Reading this feels like finally finding out what all those characters in nineteenth-century novels, with their contrived misunderstandings and drawing-room spats, were really thinking about – the salacious concerns that lie behind all the printable novelistic metaphors. When the Goncourts and their famous friends get together for a chat, instead of just talking about who batted their eyelashes at whom last night, they are more likely to wax lyrical about
the strange and unique beauty of the face of any woman – even the commonest whore – who reaches her climax: the indefinable look which comes into her eyes, the delicate character which her features take on, the angelic, almost sacred expression which one sees on the faces of the dying and which suddenly appears on hers at the moment of the little death.
la singulière et originale beauté du visage de toute femme qui jouit—même chez la dernière gadoue—, de ce je ne sais quoi qui vient à ses yeux, de cet affiné que prennent les lignes de sa figure, de l'angélique qui y monte, du caractère presque sacré que revêt le visage des mourants qui s'y voit soudain sous l'apparence de la « petite mort ».
(An idea expressed in almost identical terms, incidentally, more than 150 years later in Nicholson Baker's The Fermata.) Or about their aversion to the ‘oriental practice’ of women shaving their pubic hair:
‘It must look like a priest's chin,’ said Saint-Victor.
It is all amazing stuff. The Goncourts are alert to the best gossip, the most entertaining and revealing anecdotes; their keen sense that they are underappreciated geniuses drives a lot of their observations of the people around them who are (as they see it) getting the success that they, the Goncourts, deserve. This is lucky for us, because it keeps them deeply interested in the artists around them to the very end.
The most prominent of these is Zola, who first pops up in the journals as an unknown fan. His prodigious work ethic and knack for publicity soon means that he is getting all the glory, and all the money, of being the leader of the new ‘Naturalist’ movement. The Goncourts reckon, not without some reason, that he lifted most of his best ideas from them, and they duly note down all the examples they can find. But they're impressed despite themselves at how good he is with the press; as Zola cheerfully confesses,
‘I have a certain taste for charlatanism…I consider the word Naturalism as ridiculous as you do, but I shall go on repeating it over and over again, because you have to give new things new names for the public to think that they are new...’
The attitude of all concerned towards women is shocking, especially in the early years (Edmond does mature quite a lot towards the end, benefitting from a close and gossipy friendship with Princess Mathilde Bonaparte that was clearly very important to him). The women that get discussed tend to be gaupes ‘trollops’, gueuses ‘sluts’ or gadoues ‘whores’; sometimes translator Robert Baldick even renders filles ‘girls’ as ‘tarts’, which, given the tone, is not unreasonable. The brothers confess somewhere that neither of them has really been in love for more than a few days at a time, and their deepest emotion is always reserved for each other. Edmond's description of his brother's eventual death from syphilis is heart-breaking: ‘This morning he was unable to remember a single title among the books he has written.’
And death does loom pretty large over parts of the journal, which covers such upheavals as the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the suppression of the Commune – but the Goncourts' eye is always on individual responses, picturesque incident, personal idiosyncrasies.
Neither of them ever marries, although Edmond thinks about it a few times after his brother has gone. He tries to let down gently the few women that approach him. Eventually, in a passage that's somehow both creepy and moving, he confides that he's never really got over his first erotic experience as a young boy, when he was staying in his cousin's house:
One morning […] I went into their bedroom without knocking. And I went in just as my cousin, her head thrown back, her knees up, her legs apart and her bottom raised on a pillow, was on the point of being impaled [enfourchée] by her husband. There was a swift movement of the two bodies, in which my cousin's pink bottom disappeared so quickly beneath the sheets that I might have thought it had been a hallucination…. But the vision remained with me. And until I met Mme Charles, that pink bottom on a pillow with a scalloped border was the sweet, exciting image that appeared to me every night, before I went to sleep, beneath my closed eyelids.
The Journal amounts to an argument that what matters in life is sex, death and literature – only the characters illustrating this are not fictional creations but rather Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Degas, Barbey d'Aurevilley, Huysmans, Dumas, Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and Turgenev. It's not only glorious and life-affirming, it's also very moving because even while Edmond rages against how his literary works have been overlooked, the reader is increasingly aware that this journal is going to be everything that they hoped for their novels, and more.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
A talent they obviously had. I would rather read half a page of the Goncourts on Zola than a hundred pages of Zola himself. Indeed right now I feel I'd rather read half a page of the Goncourts on anything than almost anything else.
January 12, 2022
The essential Goncourt Brothers were like the twin Truman Capotes of their day. However, unlike Capote they never had a big novel, though they tried. Oh, and they were straight.
“Suspicion of the entire female sex has entered into our minds for the rest of our lives; a horror of the duplicity of woman’s soul, of her prodigious gift, her consummate genius for mendacity.” (p. 76)
This is a worthwhile read. But the misogyny will set your hair on fire. The Goncourts—debauchees and gossips—saw women as whores, and blamed them for their troubles. Given that Jules, the younger brother, was eventually to die of neurosyphilis, maybe that was prescient.
A riveting window on a lost world. Friends of the Goncourts included Charles Baudelaire, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, Edgar Dégas, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, J.-K. Huysmans, Éduoard Manet, Guy de Maupassant, Alexander Pushkin, Auguste Rodin, George Sand, Emile Zola among others.
Gustave Flaubert on Marquis de Sade: “‘He is the last word in Catholicism,’ he said. ‘Let me explain: he is the spirit of the Inquisition, the spirit of torture, the spirit of the medieval Church, the horror of nature. There isn’t a single tree in Sade, or a single animal.’” (p. 48)
The Goncourts’ critiques of their contemporaries may be justified; frankly many are of artists or journalists I’m not familiar with. But the rants against some, especially those in the lucrative theater, are clearly spiteful envy. As Martin Amis said, I paraphrase, envy never comes to the ball as envy, it always comes as some superficially objective criticism. There’s plenty of that here.
The journals give a good sense of the politicization of the theater, with paid claques, audience members hissing, declarations of pique from the audience—just madness. Imagine people going out to first nights solely to hiss and ruin the show for others, no matter its merits.
Much energy is spent ridiculing critics of the Goncourts’ novels, which though seen as unimportant today, other contemporaries we’re known to imitate; Zola being one.
“It is wonderful what a center of debauchery the theater is . . . It would be impossible to gather together in a smaller space a greater number of sexual stimulants, of invitations to copulation. It is like a Stock Exchange dealing in women’s nights.” (p. 68)
“If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.” (p. 135)
Early in 1870 Jules dies of neurosyphilis; his brother Edmond describes his death throes in excruciating detail. Absolutely heartbreaking pages…
Later that year the Prussians ignominiously defeat France. This part of French history I know about mostly from Emile Zola’s superb The Debacle, which is about the Battle of Sedan. Here Goncourt, a monarchist to the marrow, describes street scenes during the fall of the monarchy, the establishment of the Paris Commune, which is ultimately massacred (15-20,000 souls) by the French Army. Goncourt witnesses some of the round ups.
“The semaine sanglante ("bloody week"), from 21 to 28 May 1871, was a short and bloody military campaign by the French Army . . . that recaptured Paris from the Paris Commune. Many Commune prisoners . . . were summarily shot by the army. In the final days, the Commune executed about one hundred hostages . . . and burned many Paris landmarks . . . .” — from Wikipedia
On Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony: “The Bible, the Christian past, brought up to date in the Horace Vernet manner, with the addition of Bedouin and Turkish bric-a-brac.” (p. 195)
“Looking at the Jews I know growing old around me, I am sometimes astonished at the peculiar ugliness which the years bring them. It is not our decrepitude but a moral ugliness. What is the explanation? I believe it is to be found in the purely material appetites and desires, in a life with no other object than money.” (p. 284)
There is so much that is objectional here: the anti-Semitism, the discussions about how real men fuck women correctly, etc. So you’ve got to measure each part separately and not let the bad cancel out the considerable amount of good.
“My cousin Fédora, talking to me today about a branch of her family which is almost poor, said: ‘Just imagine: they are people who for five generations have married for love!’” (p. 337)
Herein lies the “revelation” that Guy de Maupassant was in fact Gustav Flaubert’s biological son. The biographer of both men, Francis Steegmuller, questioned the claim in a Oct. 5 1974 New York Times article. It’s true Flaubert and Maupssant’s mother knew each other as youths. But the timing for him to have impregnated her just before his trip to the “orient” is iffy. Then again Flaubert was the younger man’s mentor. Maupassant studied under Flaubert, planned and managed his funeral and brought sculptor and donors together for the Flaubert memorial bas-relief
“‘A child! The eyes of a child . . . No, it’s too much!’ exclaimed [Alphonse] Daudet in connection with the graveside speeches and newspaper articles about Verlaine’s funeral. ‘A man who used to stab his lovers, who, in a fit of bestial lust, once tore off his clothes and ran stark naked after an Ardennes shepherd! . . . And that article by Barrès, who has never written a line of verse and who acted as one of the pallbearers, Barrè who is fundamentally a champion of stylish dressing and decent living . . . . The joker wrote that article just to proclaim that he is the intellectual prince of the younger generation!’ (p. 407)
“Suspicion of the entire female sex has entered into our minds for the rest of our lives; a horror of the duplicity of woman’s soul, of her prodigious gift, her consummate genius for mendacity.” (p. 76)
This is a worthwhile read. But the misogyny will set your hair on fire. The Goncourts—debauchees and gossips—saw women as whores, and blamed them for their troubles. Given that Jules, the younger brother, was eventually to die of neurosyphilis, maybe that was prescient.
A riveting window on a lost world. Friends of the Goncourts included Charles Baudelaire, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, Edgar Dégas, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, J.-K. Huysmans, Éduoard Manet, Guy de Maupassant, Alexander Pushkin, Auguste Rodin, George Sand, Emile Zola among others.
Gustave Flaubert on Marquis de Sade: “‘He is the last word in Catholicism,’ he said. ‘Let me explain: he is the spirit of the Inquisition, the spirit of torture, the spirit of the medieval Church, the horror of nature. There isn’t a single tree in Sade, or a single animal.’” (p. 48)
The Goncourts’ critiques of their contemporaries may be justified; frankly many are of artists or journalists I’m not familiar with. But the rants against some, especially those in the lucrative theater, are clearly spiteful envy. As Martin Amis said, I paraphrase, envy never comes to the ball as envy, it always comes as some superficially objective criticism. There’s plenty of that here.
The journals give a good sense of the politicization of the theater, with paid claques, audience members hissing, declarations of pique from the audience—just madness. Imagine people going out to first nights solely to hiss and ruin the show for others, no matter its merits.
Much energy is spent ridiculing critics of the Goncourts’ novels, which though seen as unimportant today, other contemporaries we’re known to imitate; Zola being one.
“It is wonderful what a center of debauchery the theater is . . . It would be impossible to gather together in a smaller space a greater number of sexual stimulants, of invitations to copulation. It is like a Stock Exchange dealing in women’s nights.” (p. 68)
“If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.” (p. 135)
Early in 1870 Jules dies of neurosyphilis; his brother Edmond describes his death throes in excruciating detail. Absolutely heartbreaking pages…
Later that year the Prussians ignominiously defeat France. This part of French history I know about mostly from Emile Zola’s superb The Debacle, which is about the Battle of Sedan. Here Goncourt, a monarchist to the marrow, describes street scenes during the fall of the monarchy, the establishment of the Paris Commune, which is ultimately massacred (15-20,000 souls) by the French Army. Goncourt witnesses some of the round ups.
“The semaine sanglante ("bloody week"), from 21 to 28 May 1871, was a short and bloody military campaign by the French Army . . . that recaptured Paris from the Paris Commune. Many Commune prisoners . . . were summarily shot by the army. In the final days, the Commune executed about one hundred hostages . . . and burned many Paris landmarks . . . .” — from Wikipedia
On Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony: “The Bible, the Christian past, brought up to date in the Horace Vernet manner, with the addition of Bedouin and Turkish bric-a-brac.” (p. 195)
“Looking at the Jews I know growing old around me, I am sometimes astonished at the peculiar ugliness which the years bring them. It is not our decrepitude but a moral ugliness. What is the explanation? I believe it is to be found in the purely material appetites and desires, in a life with no other object than money.” (p. 284)
There is so much that is objectional here: the anti-Semitism, the discussions about how real men fuck women correctly, etc. So you’ve got to measure each part separately and not let the bad cancel out the considerable amount of good.
“My cousin Fédora, talking to me today about a branch of her family which is almost poor, said: ‘Just imagine: they are people who for five generations have married for love!’” (p. 337)
Herein lies the “revelation” that Guy de Maupassant was in fact Gustav Flaubert’s biological son. The biographer of both men, Francis Steegmuller, questioned the claim in a Oct. 5 1974 New York Times article. It’s true Flaubert and Maupssant’s mother knew each other as youths. But the timing for him to have impregnated her just before his trip to the “orient” is iffy. Then again Flaubert was the younger man’s mentor. Maupassant studied under Flaubert, planned and managed his funeral and brought sculptor and donors together for the Flaubert memorial bas-relief
“‘A child! The eyes of a child . . . No, it’s too much!’ exclaimed [Alphonse] Daudet in connection with the graveside speeches and newspaper articles about Verlaine’s funeral. ‘A man who used to stab his lovers, who, in a fit of bestial lust, once tore off his clothes and ran stark naked after an Ardennes shepherd! . . . And that article by Barrès, who has never written a line of verse and who acted as one of the pallbearers, Barrè who is fundamentally a champion of stylish dressing and decent living . . . . The joker wrote that article just to proclaim that he is the intellectual prince of the younger generation!’ (p. 407)
August 27, 2010
People died differently in the nineteenth century, and they took a long time doing it. The appalling deaths described in the Goncourt Journal are enough to make you get down on your knees and thank God and Pasteur for antibiotics. Henri Murger, author of the source novel for La Bohème, contracted something called ‘senile gangrene’ and literally rotted to pieces; when his attendants tried to trim his moustache, his lip came off. The journalist Robert Caze punctured his liver in a duel and spent months dying in a fourth-floor apartment. And then there’s Jules de Goncourt himself, who by his late thirties was showing symptoms of advanced syphilis: memory loss, aphasia, paralysis and dementia, each stage being scrupulously recorded by his brother in the journal they had shared.
Why do I keep coming back, year after year, to this cynical, malicious, death-haunted book? Or did I just answer my own question? And while I’m on the subject, why are all my favourite books cynical, malicious and death-haunted? Why are they so freaking French, in other words? But let’s not talk about that now.
You know how they say every generation thinks it discovered sex? Well, maybe it would be equally true to say that every generation thinks it invented modernity. Already the fashions and gadgetry of the 90s—remember flannel shirts? The Discman? The ‘information superhighway’?—must seem ineffably lame to the smug fifteen-year-olds I see on the subway blasting that hippity hop racket out of their so-called ‘cellular telephones’.
On the evidence of the Goncourt Journal, though, the signifiers of hipness—irony, urbanity, a disaffected pose—were well in place long before Lou Reed first put on sunglasses and a sneer. Historically speaking, the brothers may have been stranded among the plush and gaslights of the Second Empire, but spiritually they were already living in their own private twentieth century. It’s not included in this translation, but there’s a passage in the original where the Goncourts and a bunch of their Boho friends are sitting around and bitching about how disgustingly modern they feel. When someone or other disagrees, good old Théophile Gautier gets up and declares himself so modern he wants to puke.
That’s another thing about the journal: it’s funny. The Goncourts knew all the leading writers of the day and used to host glorified piss-ups for them at a chi-chi restaurant in Paris. So you had all these impossibly witty guys hanging out and totally burning each other over oysters and champagne. You get the impression the Goncourts spent the whole night jotting one-liners down on napkins and muttering to themselves, ‘Oh man, this is gold.’
And what did they talk about, these assembled geniuses? Women, mostly. Sure, every once in a while there’d be a screaming match about prose style, but they always came back to women. Women and sex. It’s almost sweet, in a pervy, French sort of way. (At one point, Zola confesses that he fantasizes about pubescent girls: ‘Yes, it frightens me sometimes…I see the Assize Court and all the rest of it.’)
With Jules’ death in 1870, some of the youthful piss and vinegar goes out of the journal, but if Edmond was a little more decorous than his brother, he was definitely the bitchier of the two. I don’t think I’ve read anything as eloquently catty as this tremendous putdown of Hippolyte Taine and his wife:
The stupid walk of that potbellied clergyman, with his sly, hypocritical gaze hidden behind his spectacles, and the swarthy, unhealthy ugliness of the horrifying wife, who looks like a diseased silkworm which a schoolboy has daubed with ink, make a truly dreadful sight for the eyes of an aesthete.
I have no idea what a diseased silkworm might look like, but it sounds really, really mean.
I’ve nattered on shamelessly but I don’t know if I’ve managed to convey just how awesome the journal is. That’s the problem with trying to talk about a book that’s a whole lot smarter and funnier than you are: it ends up judging you.
Why do I keep coming back, year after year, to this cynical, malicious, death-haunted book? Or did I just answer my own question? And while I’m on the subject, why are all my favourite books cynical, malicious and death-haunted? Why are they so freaking French, in other words? But let’s not talk about that now.
You know how they say every generation thinks it discovered sex? Well, maybe it would be equally true to say that every generation thinks it invented modernity. Already the fashions and gadgetry of the 90s—remember flannel shirts? The Discman? The ‘information superhighway’?—must seem ineffably lame to the smug fifteen-year-olds I see on the subway blasting that hippity hop racket out of their so-called ‘cellular telephones’.
On the evidence of the Goncourt Journal, though, the signifiers of hipness—irony, urbanity, a disaffected pose—were well in place long before Lou Reed first put on sunglasses and a sneer. Historically speaking, the brothers may have been stranded among the plush and gaslights of the Second Empire, but spiritually they were already living in their own private twentieth century. It’s not included in this translation, but there’s a passage in the original where the Goncourts and a bunch of their Boho friends are sitting around and bitching about how disgustingly modern they feel. When someone or other disagrees, good old Théophile Gautier gets up and declares himself so modern he wants to puke.
That’s another thing about the journal: it’s funny. The Goncourts knew all the leading writers of the day and used to host glorified piss-ups for them at a chi-chi restaurant in Paris. So you had all these impossibly witty guys hanging out and totally burning each other over oysters and champagne. You get the impression the Goncourts spent the whole night jotting one-liners down on napkins and muttering to themselves, ‘Oh man, this is gold.’
And what did they talk about, these assembled geniuses? Women, mostly. Sure, every once in a while there’d be a screaming match about prose style, but they always came back to women. Women and sex. It’s almost sweet, in a pervy, French sort of way. (At one point, Zola confesses that he fantasizes about pubescent girls: ‘Yes, it frightens me sometimes…I see the Assize Court and all the rest of it.’)
With Jules’ death in 1870, some of the youthful piss and vinegar goes out of the journal, but if Edmond was a little more decorous than his brother, he was definitely the bitchier of the two. I don’t think I’ve read anything as eloquently catty as this tremendous putdown of Hippolyte Taine and his wife:
The stupid walk of that potbellied clergyman, with his sly, hypocritical gaze hidden behind his spectacles, and the swarthy, unhealthy ugliness of the horrifying wife, who looks like a diseased silkworm which a schoolboy has daubed with ink, make a truly dreadful sight for the eyes of an aesthete.
I have no idea what a diseased silkworm might look like, but it sounds really, really mean.
I’ve nattered on shamelessly but I don’t know if I’ve managed to convey just how awesome the journal is. That’s the problem with trying to talk about a book that’s a whole lot smarter and funnier than you are: it ends up judging you.
October 30, 2020
This 19thC "journal" hangs like a glittering chandelier over the Paris of 1851-1896, illuminating la comedie humaine that is recorded by, among others, the authors, Zola and later Proust. Of enormous vitality and breadth of interests, the Goncourt brothers Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870), present in remarkable detail a socio-sexual, literary and political document that is living history. Writing as one, until Jules died of syphilis, they stated: "Our minds see alike and we see with the same eyes."
The Goncourt "players," along w those in cameo roles, include Zola, Flaubert, Gautier, Dumas (pere et fils), Sainte-Beuve, Degas, Turgenev, George Sand, Princess Mathilde and Oscar Wilde (before his fall). Chambermaids pregnant by Monsieur, servants, whores and priests add to the mise-en-scene. Anecdotes, conversations and impressions herein are reported with rapier wit and elegance.
Despite the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, these were mostly years of high intellect and of frivolous vivacity, plus a cultivated awareness of the present which gave free rein to adventures of the mind. The Goncourt ensemble exudes personality. Because of their brains, charm, liveliness, they're all a pleasure to be with at dinners, salons, parties and theatre premieres. Talking sense or nonsense, it doesnt matter, for the test of interesting people is that subject matter doesnt matter.
Sainte-Beuve, in a cafe : "Philosophers know perfectly well that the immortality of the soul doesnt exist any more than God does." ~ Gautier at dinner w Flaubert, Turgenev and Edmond de Goncourt: "Nothing interests me anymore. I have a feeling that I have ceased to be a contemporary. I'm prepared to talk about myself in the third person." ~ Flaubert: "Style? How many readers enjoy and appreciate it?" ~ Again, Flaubert on de Sade: "It's the most entertaining nonsense I've ever come across."
Gossip is, of course, the very life of conversation when handled w lightness. The Goncourt Brothers
delve into het sex and love with thoughtful finesse that Ed White misses in his same-sex "Farewell Symphony," which models itself on this book, w a colorless cast. Husbands have wives, mistresses, and favorite prostitutes...syphilis (not AIDs) is rampant. Gautier advises young men: try to have fun without catching the pox, but very few escape this deadly fate. The Brothers: "Hanged if we can remember ever having been in love for more than one week at a time." Or: "One week of love and... we come out of it spiritually weary and physically sick, when life seems flat as bad wine."
To the Goncourt Brothers fictional lives make a more profound impression on the world than real lives. For the man of letters has the power to immortalize anything at will. They further warn: "Time cures one of everything -- even of living."
Another Goncourt pensee - "A book is never a masterpiece; it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man."
The Goncourt "players," along w those in cameo roles, include Zola, Flaubert, Gautier, Dumas (pere et fils), Sainte-Beuve, Degas, Turgenev, George Sand, Princess Mathilde and Oscar Wilde (before his fall). Chambermaids pregnant by Monsieur, servants, whores and priests add to the mise-en-scene. Anecdotes, conversations and impressions herein are reported with rapier wit and elegance.
Despite the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, these were mostly years of high intellect and of frivolous vivacity, plus a cultivated awareness of the present which gave free rein to adventures of the mind. The Goncourt ensemble exudes personality. Because of their brains, charm, liveliness, they're all a pleasure to be with at dinners, salons, parties and theatre premieres. Talking sense or nonsense, it doesnt matter, for the test of interesting people is that subject matter doesnt matter.
Sainte-Beuve, in a cafe : "Philosophers know perfectly well that the immortality of the soul doesnt exist any more than God does." ~ Gautier at dinner w Flaubert, Turgenev and Edmond de Goncourt: "Nothing interests me anymore. I have a feeling that I have ceased to be a contemporary. I'm prepared to talk about myself in the third person." ~ Flaubert: "Style? How many readers enjoy and appreciate it?" ~ Again, Flaubert on de Sade: "It's the most entertaining nonsense I've ever come across."
Gossip is, of course, the very life of conversation when handled w lightness. The Goncourt Brothers
delve into het sex and love with thoughtful finesse that Ed White misses in his same-sex "Farewell Symphony," which models itself on this book, w a colorless cast. Husbands have wives, mistresses, and favorite prostitutes...syphilis (not AIDs) is rampant. Gautier advises young men: try to have fun without catching the pox, but very few escape this deadly fate. The Brothers: "Hanged if we can remember ever having been in love for more than one week at a time." Or: "One week of love and... we come out of it spiritually weary and physically sick, when life seems flat as bad wine."
To the Goncourt Brothers fictional lives make a more profound impression on the world than real lives. For the man of letters has the power to immortalize anything at will. They further warn: "Time cures one of everything -- even of living."
Another Goncourt pensee - "A book is never a masterpiece; it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man."
October 5, 2013
Having rated this book from when I read it years ago, I looked at the book again last night and have rated it upwards. It certainly deserves it.
I was reminded of this book this morning when I saw that Warwick is currently reading it.
I'm looking rather sadly at what was my magnificent Folio Society edition until Jasper, a labrador who loved to chew books unfortunately, decided one day that this was his flavour of the month and ate part of the protective outer covering the Folio Society use. Luckily he didn't manage to destroy the book itself.
This is an excellent witty and social document about life in the late nineteenth century in Paris, beautifully portrayed by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. The illustrations are delightful depicting individuals such as Alexandre Dumas, father and also son, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, Victor Hugo, George Sands, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, etc.
I was also fascinated to see that the brothers wrote this literary work between them as they were so different in their personalities "Edmond, born at Nancy in May 1822, was slow, serious, phlegmatic, very much the responsible elder brother; while Jules, born in Paris in December 1830, was volatile, quick-witted, mischievous, very much the spoilt younger brother. Yet from the point of view of instinct, taste, and sensibility the two men were one."
A remarkable book and highly recommended.
I was reminded of this book this morning when I saw that Warwick is currently reading it.
I'm looking rather sadly at what was my magnificent Folio Society edition until Jasper, a labrador who loved to chew books unfortunately, decided one day that this was his flavour of the month and ate part of the protective outer covering the Folio Society use. Luckily he didn't manage to destroy the book itself.
This is an excellent witty and social document about life in the late nineteenth century in Paris, beautifully portrayed by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. The illustrations are delightful depicting individuals such as Alexandre Dumas, father and also son, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev, Victor Hugo, George Sands, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, etc.
I was also fascinated to see that the brothers wrote this literary work between them as they were so different in their personalities "Edmond, born at Nancy in May 1822, was slow, serious, phlegmatic, very much the responsible elder brother; while Jules, born in Paris in December 1830, was volatile, quick-witted, mischievous, very much the spoilt younger brother. Yet from the point of view of instinct, taste, and sensibility the two men were one."
A remarkable book and highly recommended.
October 7, 2019
Roger Williams, in The Horror of Life, a book I love to hate and am always close to tossing, argues that of the brothers Goncourt, Jules was more energized by neurosis and misanthropy. After reading this selection of the Journal I'm inclined to agree. It seems that after Jules' slow death from syphilis in 1870, the book loses some of its bite. Initially I was a little bored with Edmond as the sole recorder, but he grew on me, and the entries of those twilight years are probably more memorable than what came before. I admire the wintry stoicism with which he persisted in his literary projects, despite the loss of his twin-minded collaborator and the continued condescension of much of the Parisian literati, professional ink-stained wretches who saw aristocratic writers as mere dilettantes (Byron and Pushkin also provoked reverse snobbery). Many of the incidents are touching, as when Edmond, in the last years of his life, is made an Officer of The Legion of Honor, and is feted at a huge banquet by old friends and reconciled enemies. And it's grimly funny when he demurs marrying a young woman because he doesn't want her to waste her best years caring for a dying old man, and because he wants to reserve his entire estate for the creation of the Académie Goncourt; when his lawyers initially nix this idea, he exclaims, "But I passed on marriage for this!" Edmond planned the academy as a stronghold of his taste, to rival and irritate the Académie française--not a completely dotty scheme it turned out, as the Prix Goncourt became France's most prestigious literary prize. The Académie Goncourt honored Proust (in 1913, for Swann's Way), which is more than the popinjays of the Nobel committee can claim.
http://www.academie-goncourt.fr/
http://www.academie-goncourt.fr/
February 27, 2009
I thought this book might slow down a bit after Jules' death and the Commune of 1871 (such striking descriptions of a Paris embattled by the siege!), but it turns out that Edmond was perhaps the more sensitive observer of the two brothers, and his later years are perhaps richer in detail and painterly subtlety than the time when the journal was a product of two minds. I found myself mentally comparing it to Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, in the way that through fragmented recollections, scene-paintings, thoughts on literary theory, philosophy and the descriptions of manners of a cast of innumerable minor figures the book develops a kind of shattered mosaic quality. But because the Journals are dated, and have recurring characters (such "minor figures" as Flaubert, Daudet, Gautier, Zola, Turgenev) depicted in various scenes throughout their lives and deaths, there is an underlying sense of narrative that The Book of Disquiet, by its very nature, cannot have. The Goncourts are genuinely hilarious and scathing, and are magnificent observers of life. I felt, coming to the end of the journals, almost a sense of loss that I would no longer be sharing in Edmond's private world. This is an inexhaustable resource for anyone interested in the literary life of Paris in the 19th century.
August 2, 2011
Oh, my dear Edmond, we have grown so close over these pages, and after all your eulogies for your compatriots who've died so tragically along the way, I shudder at the blankness of the page after the words: "Here ends the journal of Edmond de Goncourt, who died twelve days later at Champrosay." Your greatest passion, your driving force, was to be remembered after your death, that your marriage to literature would sustain a legacy, and yet, you died on a blank page.
Few outside of a French Literature Masters even know your name, for all the name dropping and shoulder-rubbing you engaged in with "the greats." Wikipedia, if not an accredited source, is at least a palaverous one, and barely touches the immense influence Goncourt would have us believe he made on French society. It is amazing how one could be so central a figure in gossip-mongering, your Grenier the address for Parisian tabloid exploitation, and yet be so convinced of your literate sincerity, your naturalist purity -- he swears he never told a lie in all his career, but even the footnotes doubt him. Perhaps the paradoxical tragedy is, for all his ennui for his own misunderstood literary career, I am more drawn to read the works of his colleagues and enemies than his own nearly forgotten novels, the characters that he praises and maligns, sometimes both within a decade, or within a paragraph. I'm forced now to revisit Madame Bovary, perhaps the greatest book ever to be in print, according to Goncourt, and perhaps the only opinion Goncourt loyally maintained throughout his life. I must read, not necessarily the prodigious works of Mdm. George Sand, but certainly her biography. I must read some short stories of Maupassant, and a novel or two of Zola and Balzac and Turgenev, and, if I can bear it, a tome of Dumas. (Exclamation point concerning the gossip disclosed that Maupassant could be Flaubert's illegitimate son!) And then, once all of their stories of realism, the dirty and depraved lives of prostitutes and debtors are swimming in my brain, I can imagine all these fat frenchmen (and one Russian) around a dinner table, as they often were, smoking their cigars and sipping claret, and punching each other's egos behind their backs. I'll thank the gods I wasn't a woman in any way connected with these old cronies, for if I hadn't born a son who'd proved some literary talent, there's no room for my dignity here --I'm either a hag, a tart, or, at best, a cocotte. And I'll wonder how these old men's lives seem any more enlightened than the lives we lead today -- they're just syphilitic, misogynistic, egotistical, disappointed old men, but yet they all happened to write some stories for the ages, to observe in their society what they failed to see in themselves, whose books take unassailable space on our "classics" shelves, well...apparently all but Goncourt.
Rest in peace, my friend.
Few outside of a French Literature Masters even know your name, for all the name dropping and shoulder-rubbing you engaged in with "the greats." Wikipedia, if not an accredited source, is at least a palaverous one, and barely touches the immense influence Goncourt would have us believe he made on French society. It is amazing how one could be so central a figure in gossip-mongering, your Grenier the address for Parisian tabloid exploitation, and yet be so convinced of your literate sincerity, your naturalist purity -- he swears he never told a lie in all his career, but even the footnotes doubt him. Perhaps the paradoxical tragedy is, for all his ennui for his own misunderstood literary career, I am more drawn to read the works of his colleagues and enemies than his own nearly forgotten novels, the characters that he praises and maligns, sometimes both within a decade, or within a paragraph. I'm forced now to revisit Madame Bovary, perhaps the greatest book ever to be in print, according to Goncourt, and perhaps the only opinion Goncourt loyally maintained throughout his life. I must read, not necessarily the prodigious works of Mdm. George Sand, but certainly her biography. I must read some short stories of Maupassant, and a novel or two of Zola and Balzac and Turgenev, and, if I can bear it, a tome of Dumas. (Exclamation point concerning the gossip disclosed that Maupassant could be Flaubert's illegitimate son!) And then, once all of their stories of realism, the dirty and depraved lives of prostitutes and debtors are swimming in my brain, I can imagine all these fat frenchmen (and one Russian) around a dinner table, as they often were, smoking their cigars and sipping claret, and punching each other's egos behind their backs. I'll thank the gods I wasn't a woman in any way connected with these old cronies, for if I hadn't born a son who'd proved some literary talent, there's no room for my dignity here --I'm either a hag, a tart, or, at best, a cocotte. And I'll wonder how these old men's lives seem any more enlightened than the lives we lead today -- they're just syphilitic, misogynistic, egotistical, disappointed old men, but yet they all happened to write some stories for the ages, to observe in their society what they failed to see in themselves, whose books take unassailable space on our "classics" shelves, well...apparently all but Goncourt.
Rest in peace, my friend.
October 24, 2012
This is a marvellous book. Just pure enjoyment. I only wish a had a little walled garden and a daybed to lounge on while I read it, and a maidservant to bring me iced sweet tea and petit fours.
***
Although I have read numerous Prix Goncourt winners, and I goddamn adore Flaubert and Zola, I had never read any of the actual Goncourt journals. Now I wish I could slap my younger self about the face and thrust this book into my hands with an admonition to READ IT!
I can hear Nana's voice in the conversation of every "tart" they record.
And the prose is so lovely *swoony thing*. Like, not technically perfect, but urk!, the feels . Here's one of the brothers, climbing up to the balcony of another man's mistress:
"I climbed up as nimbly and feverishly as a madman and as automatically as a sleepwalker, drawn into the orbit of that white dressing-gown. Finally I got to the top and jumped onto the balcony. I had been in love for a distance of fifteen feet. I am convinced that I shall never be in love in all my life except in fits and starts like that. It rises, takes you by the throat and delights you: a paradise that comes and goes."
And, oh, the curse I am under, being an only child. Without each other the brothers are,
". . . incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost"
A big shout-out to the fabulous Isa, who doesn't know it, but who prompted me to buy this as I saw she was reading it. Thank you!
***
Although I have read numerous Prix Goncourt winners, and I goddamn adore Flaubert and Zola, I had never read any of the actual Goncourt journals. Now I wish I could slap my younger self about the face and thrust this book into my hands with an admonition to READ IT!
I can hear Nana's voice in the conversation of every "tart" they record.
And the prose is so lovely *swoony thing*. Like, not technically perfect, but urk!, the feels . Here's one of the brothers, climbing up to the balcony of another man's mistress:
"I climbed up as nimbly and feverishly as a madman and as automatically as a sleepwalker, drawn into the orbit of that white dressing-gown. Finally I got to the top and jumped onto the balcony. I had been in love for a distance of fifteen feet. I am convinced that I shall never be in love in all my life except in fits and starts like that. It rises, takes you by the throat and delights you: a paradise that comes and goes."
And, oh, the curse I am under, being an only child. Without each other the brothers are,
". . . incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost"
A big shout-out to the fabulous Isa, who doesn't know it, but who prompted me to buy this as I saw she was reading it. Thank you!
November 11, 2019
Even just a few pages in, I'm inclined to rate this compendium of 19 c. Parisian life, as being very entertaining, indeed. The prose quality is rich, first of all. A high order of lucidity and expression for what purports to be a simply 'daily diary' of what-happened-at-lunch and what-happened-at-dinner. Did people really write like this, even in their private journals? Its extremely readable.
Beyond this basic observation--what is supreme about the journal--whether or not bits and pieces of it are actually true or not--is that it is frank. Bluntly so. How unlike the fraudulent, pusillanimous era of our own time. These guys wrote scathingly, baldly, and unabashedly about whatever they encountered in life, and whatever they had to say about it, they said. A lot of it is quite petty and primping, of course--these two brothers were, after all--a pair of court dandies and theater fops. They are delicate, high-strung, sensitive, and shrill.
But they also have 'spine' where and when it is called for. They believe in what they believe. Heaven help you if you went against them in any major way; for in this collection of gossip and anecdotes, they surely 'got the last word in' on everybody.
If you were an octoroon, a mulatto, a card cheat, a plagiarist, a usurer, a bastard, came from low-birth, too bad--because in these diaries, you got 'outed'. To these bro's, a whore was a whore, a slut was a slut, a cad was a cad, a wastrel was a wastrel. They used the appropriate terminology. No pretences!
If someone was dying of 'the pox' (syphilis), they called him on it, they didn't pretend he was a saint. The Goncourts didn't bow, or scrape, or fawn. They didn't mamby-pamby around and mince their words! How unlike like the poltroons and cowards we suffer these days!
But perhaps what makes all this so refreshing is that they are just as blunt about their own lives. They weren't just 'slut-shaming' everyone around them, they were self-critical just as much towards themselves.
Where's our supposed progress, from that age to this? I ask you. We look back today on 1800s France as if they were barbaric. But if in all our modernity, we advance only towards hokum, self-deception, propaganda, whitewash and falsification, we are no better than these Parisians--and we're certainly not having nearly as much fun.
Beyond this basic observation--what is supreme about the journal--whether or not bits and pieces of it are actually true or not--is that it is frank. Bluntly so. How unlike the fraudulent, pusillanimous era of our own time. These guys wrote scathingly, baldly, and unabashedly about whatever they encountered in life, and whatever they had to say about it, they said. A lot of it is quite petty and primping, of course--these two brothers were, after all--a pair of court dandies and theater fops. They are delicate, high-strung, sensitive, and shrill.
But they also have 'spine' where and when it is called for. They believe in what they believe. Heaven help you if you went against them in any major way; for in this collection of gossip and anecdotes, they surely 'got the last word in' on everybody.
If you were an octoroon, a mulatto, a card cheat, a plagiarist, a usurer, a bastard, came from low-birth, too bad--because in these diaries, you got 'outed'. To these bro's, a whore was a whore, a slut was a slut, a cad was a cad, a wastrel was a wastrel. They used the appropriate terminology. No pretences!
If someone was dying of 'the pox' (syphilis), they called him on it, they didn't pretend he was a saint. The Goncourts didn't bow, or scrape, or fawn. They didn't mamby-pamby around and mince their words! How unlike like the poltroons and cowards we suffer these days!
But perhaps what makes all this so refreshing is that they are just as blunt about their own lives. They weren't just 'slut-shaming' everyone around them, they were self-critical just as much towards themselves.
Where's our supposed progress, from that age to this? I ask you. We look back today on 1800s France as if they were barbaric. But if in all our modernity, we advance only towards hokum, self-deception, propaganda, whitewash and falsification, we are no better than these Parisians--and we're certainly not having nearly as much fun.
March 19, 2017
What I knew about the freres Goncourt when I picked up this book is that a literary prize bears their name. Given their distinguished legacy, who could have ever imagined they'd be such a pair of catty gossiping bitches? They turn their condescending attentions on all the leading lights of their age -- Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Hugo, and more -- and find none of them remotely as talented as themselves. Further disdain extends liberally to the bourgeoisie, those gauche usurpers encroaching on the time-honoured aristocratic privileges of the Goncourts, and how dare they? Another endearing quality is their inveterate misogyny, which only heightens the irony that Goncourt the Younger dies from syphilis. The elder brother describes the decline, and possibly the only humanity in the book is his true agony at the loss of his beloved brother. Goncourt the Elder keeps up the journal for another 20 years, giving eyewitness descriptions of the overthrow of the emperor Napoleon (le 2eme), the Commune and various other historic, literary and artistic events. This is possibly the supreme chronicle of mid-19th century France; it's only too bad it's written by such arrogant, disagreeable observers. Finishing it nearly killed me, and I wish to god I hadn't persisted, because there's certainly no reward hiding at the end. Goncourt remains corrosive, gossipy and backstabbing through the very last words he pens, right up til his death.
August 20, 2009
This is a re-read for me -- and it came across just as well (and was just as surprising) as the first time I read it some fifteen years ago. I could only wish that the whole work were translated into English.
If you love French literature of the 19th century, this is an indispensable book to read and to keep handy. Fortunately, there is an excellent index in my edition (published by Oxford) which makes it all the more useful.
Reading the Goncourt Journal is like getting together for dinner with Flaubert, Dumas, Rodin, Daudet, Oscar Wilde, Maupassant and listening to what those bad boys had to say when they were at their ease. Edmond de Goncourt suffered grievously toward the end of his life by lawsuits and jibes in the press brought on by those who were slighted by some mention in the Journals. Be that as it may, it is worthwhile to see these giants of literature and art with their waistcoats unbuttoned, their sleeves rolled up, and their noses painted with the grape.
If you love French literature of the 19th century, this is an indispensable book to read and to keep handy. Fortunately, there is an excellent index in my edition (published by Oxford) which makes it all the more useful.
Reading the Goncourt Journal is like getting together for dinner with Flaubert, Dumas, Rodin, Daudet, Oscar Wilde, Maupassant and listening to what those bad boys had to say when they were at their ease. Edmond de Goncourt suffered grievously toward the end of his life by lawsuits and jibes in the press brought on by those who were slighted by some mention in the Journals. Be that as it may, it is worthwhile to see these giants of literature and art with their waistcoats unbuttoned, their sleeves rolled up, and their noses painted with the grape.
July 25, 2007
Genuinely quite hilarious journal entries covering Parisian literary life for basically the last half of the 19th century, initially cowritten by the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, carried on by the latter after the death of Jules in 1870. Snobby but also gleefully and wittily intolerant of pretension and humbuggery, the brothers' world is that of Flaubert, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Théophile Gautier, who are not treated with excess reverence. This is giving me a lot more context for Zola's Nana which I may try to return to.
July 27, 2011
Absolutely fantastic. This book gives you a real insiders view of Belle Epoch Paris. The Goncourts encounter Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, Saint Beuve, Degas, Huysmans, Turgenev, Mallarme, Hugo, Dumas and Verlain and mix portray the slums, streets, Theatres, Palaces and brothels of late 19th Century Paris. Wondefully vivid. A must read if you are interested in the history, culture and literature of this era.
November 18, 2007
I became fascinated with the De Goncourt brothers when I was reading up on Impressionist painters and their time period, and the De Goncourts seemed to know everyone. This book allowed me a glimpse into their very strange lives, the bond they held together, and it's a very human look at the violent upheaval of their times, and the arts.
May 20, 2018
The stars in the firmament of 19th century French literature will lose some of their lustre when you read these very entertaining memoirs. The complaining figure of a pot-bellied Émile Zola, always jealous of others’ success, is completely at odds with my alternate image of him as the fearless champion of the causes of the working classes and of Alfred Dreyfus.
The book is mostly about men talking to men, and it reflects attitudes to women that will seem neolithic to most modern readers. The use of prostitutes was just a normal part of men’s lives, and it was nothing particularly remarkable for a married man to keep a mistress, children and all. Sexual experiences are a recurring theme. This is an unfiltered account of a moment in French cultural history that is at times quite confronting. The de Goncourts and their acquaintances worry a lot about their mortality, and with good reason ; syphilis, tuberculosis, blood poisoning, apoplexy, infectious disease, and myriad vaguely described ailments exact a heavy toll, and if you happened to be a man you might also feel obliged to defend your honour by fighting a duel. Sex and death, the perennial preoccupations.
Gustave Flaubert, who ruined himself financially for the sake of a beloved niece who had married badly, and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, are two of the more attractive characters to appear in the journal, though they’re neither of them model human beings. I don’t understand Edmond de Goncourt’s contempt for the writings of Guy de Maupassant, who is my own personal favourite among French writers of the period, though I admit that there are more than a few upon whose writings I have never ventured. For any serious student of the fiction and drama of the period, the de Goncourt journals (whether in English or in French) must be compulsory reading (“incontournable”, as the French would say). This selection in translation just makes an invaluable document more approachable for the anglophone reader, and more than merely approachable – it’s altogether a compelling read.
The book is mostly about men talking to men, and it reflects attitudes to women that will seem neolithic to most modern readers. The use of prostitutes was just a normal part of men’s lives, and it was nothing particularly remarkable for a married man to keep a mistress, children and all. Sexual experiences are a recurring theme. This is an unfiltered account of a moment in French cultural history that is at times quite confronting. The de Goncourts and their acquaintances worry a lot about their mortality, and with good reason ; syphilis, tuberculosis, blood poisoning, apoplexy, infectious disease, and myriad vaguely described ailments exact a heavy toll, and if you happened to be a man you might also feel obliged to defend your honour by fighting a duel. Sex and death, the perennial preoccupations.
Gustave Flaubert, who ruined himself financially for the sake of a beloved niece who had married badly, and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, are two of the more attractive characters to appear in the journal, though they’re neither of them model human beings. I don’t understand Edmond de Goncourt’s contempt for the writings of Guy de Maupassant, who is my own personal favourite among French writers of the period, though I admit that there are more than a few upon whose writings I have never ventured. For any serious student of the fiction and drama of the period, the de Goncourt journals (whether in English or in French) must be compulsory reading (“incontournable”, as the French would say). This selection in translation just makes an invaluable document more approachable for the anglophone reader, and more than merely approachable – it’s altogether a compelling read.
February 6, 2017
I went into this book thinking the Goncourt brothers’ journal would give me interesting insights into many of the artists of the Belle Epoque in Paris. There were some interesting insights, but for the most part I just got annoyed by the egotism, privileged whining, and character assassination. The younger brother Jules composed the early part of the journal before his death at a relatively young age, whereupon his older brother Edmond continued the journal. I don’t think the older brother was any less annoying, but his writing did take on a higher gravitas for a time as a result of his heartfelt reaction to his brother’s death and the horrors of the Siege.
I came out of this book thinking that I, as a man, owe an apology to women everywhere and everywhen for the insulting views of and comments about women spouted by these two self-absorbed males. Yes, it was a different time, but their views to me were so heinous as to lose the privilege(?) of hiding behind “the times.”
Finally, this kept popping into my head as I read:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
I came out of this book thinking that I, as a man, owe an apology to women everywhere and everywhen for the insulting views of and comments about women spouted by these two self-absorbed males. Yes, it was a different time, but their views to me were so heinous as to lose the privilege(?) of hiding behind “the times.”
Finally, this kept popping into my head as I read:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
January 5, 2017
An edited English-language compilation of selected entries from the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, novelists, playwrights, critics and member of the French literary elite of the mid- to late-19th century. They counted among their friends and confidants Zola, Turgenev, Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, even Victor Hugo and very early on, Balzac. Their gossip and often sarcastic comments about other writers, their writing habits, and lifestyles are beyond fascinating - funny, scabrous, sentimental, occasionally racist or misogynist (the latter somewhat explainable by the fact that both men rarely had serious relationships with women, and picked up STDs from prostitutes, the younger brother dying from syphilis). But the insight into some of the great writers - Flaubert in particular - alone makes this work worth reading. And the insights and reflections upon art and politics of the time, and the theatre and theatrical world as well.
May 1, 2014
This is one of the great works of 19th century French literature. Sit at the Goncourt's dinner table with a bunch of syphilitics, who happen to be France's great literary geniuses of the age. Listen to them tear each other apart. Watch as one leaves and as soon as he is out the door and wheezing down the street, observe the others lean in and confess they don't think he's all he's cracked up to be. Nasty, ruthless and funny. The Goncourts manage to be thoroughly obnoxious yet never dull and if you want a book about fin-de-siecle Paris, this will reveal more than most novels. Take it with you if you are going to Paris and make sure you visit the brothers at the Montmartre Cemetery to express your thanks.
June 1, 2017
*this review may relate only to this particular edition*
Footnotes, footnotes, where are all the FOOOOTNOOOOTES!
Footnotes, footnotes, where are all the FOOOOTNOOOOTES!
November 11, 2023
I finally read this book! It has sat on my shelf for fifteen years staring at me, making me feel bad, accusing me of making a worthless purchase. Now I can stand proud with a bit less noise swirling around my brain when I stand before my bookshelf.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were significant 19th century French literary figures and brothers who dined and drank with the very best of France. Jules died first and we get painful descriptions of that demise from his brother who then went on to write and live for more than twenty five years.
While the name dropping of the greats from mid to late 19th century France is considerable my favorite portraits are of Gustave Flaubert who comes off as a tedious blowhard. This isn’t consistent with the deep and careful attention to other people and places found in my all time favorite novel ‘Sentimental Education.’
The other one I enjoyed with that of Princess Mathilda, a Napoleon relative who entertained many of the elite of Paris literary fame. The Goncourt journals captures through her, the pompous, empty show of the farcical second Napoleon empire.
This farce is re-enforced by the Goncourt descriptions of the embarrassing capture of Louis Napoleon during the Franco Prussian war of 1870 and the shocking, lengths and need for Parisians to eat horse and rat meat during the siege.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were significant 19th century French literary figures and brothers who dined and drank with the very best of France. Jules died first and we get painful descriptions of that demise from his brother who then went on to write and live for more than twenty five years.
While the name dropping of the greats from mid to late 19th century France is considerable my favorite portraits are of Gustave Flaubert who comes off as a tedious blowhard. This isn’t consistent with the deep and careful attention to other people and places found in my all time favorite novel ‘Sentimental Education.’
The other one I enjoyed with that of Princess Mathilda, a Napoleon relative who entertained many of the elite of Paris literary fame. The Goncourt journals captures through her, the pompous, empty show of the farcical second Napoleon empire.
This farce is re-enforced by the Goncourt descriptions of the embarrassing capture of Louis Napoleon during the Franco Prussian war of 1870 and the shocking, lengths and need for Parisians to eat horse and rat meat during the siege.
May 6, 2021
I loved this book. I've been encountering quotes from the Goncourt Journals for years as I read French history, and these quotes were always so interesting that I decided to finally go to the source. The source is even better than I expected, at least in this selection of pages. This book is packed with gossipy anecdotes about the great literary and artistic figure of the Second Empire and the early part of the Third Republic. The Goncourts have stories to tell about Flaubert, Hugo, Rodin, Degas, Daudet, Zola, Sand, Dumas, the other Dumas, and many more. Their stories are funny, surprising, insightful and fascinating. If you have an interest in the history or literature of France in this period then you absolutely must read this book.
The book is also impressive for the look it gives into the lives of the peculiarly close Goncourt brothers, its reporting on the Siege and the Commune, and the terrifying rollercoaster ride of opening a play on the Paris stage. I went into this thinking that it would essentially be an interesting historical document, but it turned out to be much more.
The book is also impressive for the look it gives into the lives of the peculiarly close Goncourt brothers, its reporting on the Siege and the Commune, and the terrifying rollercoaster ride of opening a play on the Paris stage. I went into this thinking that it would essentially be an interesting historical document, but it turned out to be much more.
July 23, 2017
My first thought: Almost everyone has syphilis, or will get it sooner or later – what a time!
I was mentally prepared to find this tome difficult to read on account of unabashed sexism, nationalism, racism, antisemitism et cetera. Well, yes, it has those chancres in abundance (even the modern foreword isn’t free of them), but it’s absolutely worth reading for many reasons, humanity being not the least of them. It’s truly moving in places – particularly when Edmond describes the illness and death of Jules, and his own fights against hostility and oblivion. My, but he paid a lot for his ambition – they both did.
I enjoyed the gossipy side – which is a pleasure to read – but the moments of humanity and sympathy towards others displayed by the authors were even better. And I thought it particularly interesting that despite his antisemitism, Edmond did not believe that Dreyfus was guilty.
April 26, 2021
Never in my life has it taken me almost a month to finish a single book that I loved every line of. I wish desperately that I was younger so I could buy and read all 22 volumes of this Journal. I am a fast reader which means I miss a lot and that allows me to reread my books often. My fear as I was reading this remarkable book was the knowledge that I would never have the time to reread it and so took my time absorbing every line, every phrase, every name dropped, every vivid description. It is a tiny pearl beyond price of a book. So alive and fascinating and brings to life so many people who are just names on the covers of famous books. I liked Edmond very much. I am sorry to have finished it and at the same time glad to go back to my free and easy way of reading. Journals and diaries really do require closer reading than novels of any genre.
June 20, 2016
'OFFENSIVE' ALERT !!!!...but no spoiler....
I feel compelled to clarify what some readers of this review understandably might see as an Offensive Remark re a Sexual Life. I can appreciate this reaction because the subject is too often seen as 'Private' and a sex-obsessed Church has made it into the Cardinal Sin.
These Monastic Romances, for these relationships were taken very seriously by the participants, were bred from a desperate loneliness and stifiled youthful desire; many left the Monastic Life feeling they had failed, whereas I always considered that the system had failed us. Some married and became acceptably normal, while others joined the Gay Ranks, several of these committing suicide. Guilt was well instilled. Celibacy was promoted as the Higher and Better Path; compared to those who merely married, We Celibates were able to Love Everybody. However, Lives given over to alcoholism, desperate loneliness, nervous breakdowns, secret affairs, constant guilt and quitting the monastery as failures were the Fruits of the Celibate Life for Most. Few never doubted the validity of their Forbidden Relationship and grew and blossomed instead.
To me Sex was one of God's Better Gifts and perversely I gloried in it; I finally refused to confess what I could only regard as Positive and Permissable .
"Church History", surprisingly, was never taught in the Celibate House, so we never learned that it was not introduced because of a "Vocation of Love" but as an Economic Measure by an Institution intent on the practicalities of running an efficent and profitable Organisation. Shedding wives and offspring stopped for good a drain on Profits, and were in no way Essentials of a Wholesome Life.
The Italian Clergy saw that a Sex Life was actually essential to Normalacy. Luther was scandalised on his visit to Rome, but as an apostate, he soon took an ex-nun to wife and lived 'Happily Ever After' -as did most of the priests and students who left our Monastic Order in droves after the Pope condemned Birth Control in the late 1960's.
Sex should be a Joy, not an imposition or a deprivation , and when mutually respectful and caring, never a source of Guilt. Passion and Laughter should not be strangers.
June, 2016.
Eight Years have passed since I cast aside this grotesque book
- the Mutual Diaries of the Two Goncourt Brothers -
...knowing Full Well I would have to pay it a Revisit
as it is a True Reflectionof a Slice of 19th Century French Life
...and I AM a Francophile...
and MUST face up to ALL aspects of the French and France!!
Having just resurrected the Rabelesian, bawdy Mediaeval "Droll Stories" of Honore de Balzac,
purchased soon after my Own Departure from a Catholic Monkish Monastery,
where I was part of the Unspoken Sexual Life,
...I could bring a Dinner Party to both a Deathly Silence and Laughter by calmly admitting
that my Best Years of a Lively Sex Life were spent in a Monastery...
I realised that my Naive,Ingenuous Exterior belied my Continual Search for a Realistic Life,
and Frenchmen like Emile Zola, Honore de Balzac, Proust,Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers,
de Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire etc were definitely Realists
and an area I was committed to investigating.
Thankfully I also found there Two Women -impossible to miss- Aurore Lelia Dudevant better known to History as Georges Sand... and Colette...my friends for Life.
The Goncourt Brothers and the more easily digestible de Balzac lie on my bookshelves,
a little like as yet undetonated bombs,
and before I fade away, I feel obliged to partake of their realistic though often indigestible Feasts.
Presently they still lie on their shelves, but dusted off...awaiting their coming Resurrection.
June 2016.
Written January , 2009.
DEATH AND WOMEN...with SEX,of course !!
These Journals should be put on the Feminist Shelf,
because...........................
IT - Feminism - is NEVER referred to !!!!!!!!!!
A concept never imagined or considered a possibility!!
And WHY???
Death and Women are Two of the obsessive subjects of the Jolly Goncourt Freres.
Ghastly slow deaths without modern medicines to assist.
And Women ???
Not surprisingly,it is solely "Women and ....SEX !!
Oh, yes,...plus..Women and how stupid they are.
Sadly the Women the Goncourt Brothers met also had that opinion of themselves.
The Boys never seemed to have run across George Sand
and if they did,
did they ever give her a chance to reveal herself as a Mind ??
Probably not.
Because it was not expected.
And the girls do appear to be a bit thick,
probably because they were never given a chance to see themselves as anything else but !!
Despite all the famous names,and culture and....whatever,
I really couldn't take any more,
any more of the ladies who were introduced,
and were happy to be what they were expected to be.
But we didn't get to hear the girls away from the blokes.
Now THAT may have been a revelation.
It was Revelation enough to see the Girls of the Circle of the Goncourt Brothers.
And I had had ENOUGH.
I have shelved this under "Books-I've-thrown-across-the-room"
but it is safely awaiting recall on that other shelf "Re-reads"
even though/because I NEVER finished it.
Next time,
knowing what to expect may assist in coping;
and I shall read on, glean some interesting knowledge,
accept the Times for what they were,
be glad the book has an end
and come out on the Other Side.
Vive La France !!
Read
August 18, 2024Me diverti pacas. A edição da Carambaia merece um 10 ❤️
September 17, 2024
Here is my commentary on "Pages from the Goncourt Journals.
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...
https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...
March 1, 2021
An objectionable little curiosity that, while being spoken of as a charming little volume of aphoristic observation is actually just a vain, boring volume rife with anti-Semitism and reaction. But it is also one of the loveliest volumes in the NYRB list. The beautiful design and the strange fawning reviews for this piece of forgettable cultural detritus shouldn't convince one to pick it up. You'll regret the hours lost.
May 10, 2012
The Goncourt Journals will appeal mostly to those that have read Zola, Flaubert, Daudet, Dumas, Turgenev and many other great writers living in France in the late 19th-C. It will also appeal to those that can tolerate a bit of gossip and a lot of death. Overall the book isn’t so horribly morbid but death does lurk though the majority of the entries. As I read in another review - where I can’t remember - you will be tempted to kiss your nearest doctor or biochemist for the medical advancements that possibly save you from the death agonies depicted throughout this work. I write this review only two days away from the death of two of the best children’s authors I know: Palmer Brown and Maurice Sandlak. These two great minds are only a few of the beloved, to me at least, people that have recently passed. Each entry seemed to be a variation of a similar threnody that has been ringing in my ears for the last two weeks and it’s been an exhausting if not mellifluous song that I hope ends for a while at least. This is the strength of the journals: they connect deeply with the reader. I’ll admit I’ve not ready any significant portion of the Goncourt’s writing so when they compare their literary merit with that of their peers – the results can only come off as somewhat gossipy. This is a journal so it doesn’t really prevent me from enjoying the work as such – but I think potential readers should be aware that if you’ve come looking for the lofty prose of Zola and Flaubert, you will find little of that here. The entries are well written, insightful, funny, horrid and most of all revealing of the society of their time and place. There are many quotable anecdotes such as conversations between Daudet and the Goncourts that include a beautiful description of morality as a flashing moment that was frankly touching. A whole host of bon mots bandied about amongst minds like Zola and Flaubert can only please book –lovers. Scholars will benefit from the cultural orientation that the expanse of the Goncourt’s social, literary and general aesthetic prowess illuminates. Artists including: Rodin, Carriere, Rops, Degas, Courbet and many others are included in an index that serves as a roster of some of the most amazing people that co-mingled with Goncourts. What was modern in the early years of the Goncourts gives way to the symbolist writers that saw little need for reverence of their predecessors and the Goncourt’s help the reader clearly understand this shift in trends. The Goncourt’s literary appreciation is deeper than it is wide and writers such as Maeterlink and Stendhal are dismissed as anachronistic and girl-crazy respectively in single stroke entries. Turgenev, gratefully, is discussed in brief but illuminating detail. As a student of literature and art – I was pleased to gain insight on the people that have populated my imagination for many years – as a mortal human I can’t think of a book that has brought the end of life in greater humanistic detail than in these journals. I have no current need of any additional memento mori.
September 12, 2016
I'm certainly a fan of books I can whip through thoughtlessly that don't present a lot of challenges to my known vocabulary or worldview for the sake of leisure. This is not one of those books. Despite that, I enjoyed it tremendously, if only because of the sense of wonder it provided me at each turn of the page at how drastically life has improved over these last 250 years through scientific, social and economic developments. Also it's quite funny in a mordant, Gallic way.
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