Volume 54, Number 2 · February 15, 2007
Treasures of Vanity
By Graham Robb
Pages from the Goncourt Journals
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, edited, translated from the French, and with an introduction by Robert Baldick, and with a foreword by Geoff Dyer
New York Review Books, 434 pp., $16.95 (paper)
In 1848, at the age of twenty-six, just after the death of his mother, Edmond Huot de Goncourt (1822–1896) gave up his accounting job at the public revenue department in Paris, and embarked on a new career with his younger brother Jules (1830–1870). Jules had recently passed his baccalauréat. He told a friend of their joint intention: 'My mind is made up, and nothing will make me change it.... To use an incorrect but popular expression, I shall do nothing.' The brothers had decided that instead of working for a living, they would become observers and collectors of beautiful things—books, paintings, antiques, aesthetic experiences, and women. This life of seeming idleness was to be funded by an inherited annual income of ten thousand francs (more than eight times Edmond's salary as an accountant). Their great-grandfather, Antoine Huot, had purchased the lordship and lands of Goncourt, a small village in the Vosges, in 1786, thus enabling his descendants to live in nineteenth-century Paris like aristocrats of the ancien régime.
Review, 3959 words
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