Pages from the Goncourt Journals

By Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
Foreword by Geoff Dyer
Edited and Translated by Robert Baldick

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.

Read an excerpt (PDF)

Reviews

The literary liveliness of the belle époque is exactly caught. Plushy, sleazy-sexy, cocottish—yes; but the accompaniment to all this is a passionate and unqualified concern for good writing, and an abundance of power.
— Punch

Piquant anecdotes form the inexhaustible material of Goncourt's journal and provide the reader with endless entertainment for many solitary evenings. Goncourt knew how to listen, just as he knew how to see.
— Marcel Proust

The Goncourt brothers were pioneers in the realm of realistic, almost clinical fiction. But Zola, Daudet, Maupassant reaped the fame which the Goncourts considered as their due...They were pioneers also as historians of eighteenth-century society...Mr. Baldick...has written a terse and suggestive introduction for this handsome book.
— The New York Times

Also see:

Parisian Life Collection The Dud Avocado, Memoirs of Montparnasse, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, and Witch Grass

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