Chapter 2
Leaving on one side these questions of style and manner, it may safely be said that in the novels of the Goncourts the characters are less memorable, less interesting as individuals than as illustrations of an epoch or types of a given social sphere. Charles Demailly, Madame Gervaisais, Manette Salomon, Renée Mauperin, Soeur Philomène, are not so much dramatic creations as figures around which is constituted the life of a special _milieu_--the world of journalism, of Catholicism seen from two opposite points of view, of artists, of the _bourgeoisie_, as the case may be. There are in the best work of the Goncourts astonishingly brilliant scenes; there is dialogue vivacious, witty, sparkling, to an extraordinary degree. And this dialogue, as in _Charles Demailly_, is not only supremely interesting, but intrinsically true to nature. It could not well be otherwise, for the speeches assigned to Masson, Lampérière, Remontville, Boisroger, and Montbaillard are, as often as not, verbatim reports of paradoxes and epigrams thrown off a few hours earlier by Théophile Gautier, Flaubert, Saint-Victor, Banville, and Villemessant. But these flights, true and well worth preserving as they are, fail to impress for the simple reason that they are mere exercises in bravura delivered by men much less concerned with life than with phrases, that they are allotted to subordinate characters, and that they rather serve to diminish than to increase the interest in the central figures. The Goncourts themselves are much less absorbed in life than in writing about it: just as landscapes reminded them of pictures, so did every other manifestation of existence present itself as a possible subject for artistic treatment. They had been called the detectives of history; they became detectives, inquisitors in real life, and, much as they loathed the occupation, they never rested from their task of spying and prying and "documentation." As with _Charles Demailly_, so with their other books: each character is studied after nature with a grim, revolting persistence. Their aunt, Mlle. de Courmont, is the model of Mlle. de Varandeuil in _Germinie Lacerteux_; Germinie herself is drawn from their old servant Rose, who had loved them, cheated them, blinded them for half a lifetime; the Victor Chevassier who figures in _Quelques créatures de ce temps_ is sketched from their father's old political ally, Colardez, at Breuvannes; the original of the Abbé Blampoix in _Renée Mauperin_ was the Abbé Caron; the painter Beaulieu and that strange Bohemian Pouthier are both worked into _Manette Salomon_. And the novel entitled _Madame Gervaisais_ is an almost exact transcription or record of the life of the authors' aunt, Mme. Nephthalie de Courmont: a report so literal that in three hundred pages there are but two trifling departures from the strictest historical truth.
Mommsen himself has not excelled the Goncourts in conscientious "documentation"; and yet, for all their care, their personages do not abide in the memory as living beings. We do not see them as individuals, but as types; and, strangely enough, the authors, despite the remarkable skill with which they materialize many of their impressions, are content to deliver their characters to us as so many illustrations of a species. Thus Marthe Mance in _Charles Demailly_ is _un type, l'incarnation d'un âge, de son sexe et d'un rôle de son temps_; Langibout is _le type pur de l'ancienne école_; Madame Gervaisais, too, is _un exemple et un type_ of the intellectual _bourgeoise_ of Louis-Philippe's time; Madame Mauperin is _le type_ of the modern _bourgeoise_ mother; Renée is the type of the modern _bourgeoise_ girl; the Bourjots "represent" wealth; Denoisel is a Parisian--_ou plutôt c'était le Parisien_. The Goncourts, in their endeavour to be more precise, resort to odd combinations of conflicting elements. Within some twenty pages Renée Mauperin is _une mélancolique tintamarresque_; the adjectives _bourgeoise_ and _diabolique_ are used to characterize the same thing; the Abbé Blampoix is at once "priest and lawyer, apostle and diplomatist, Fénelon and M. de Foy." And the same types constantly reappear. The physician Monterone in _Madame Gervaisais_ is simply an Italian version of Denoisel in _Renée Mauperin_; the Abbé Blampoix has his counter-part in Father Giansanti; Honorine is Germinie, before the fall; Nachette and Gautruche might be brothers. The procedure, too, is almost invariable. The antecedents of each personage are given with abundant detail. We have minute information as to the family history of the Mauperins, the Villacourts, Germinie, Couturat, and the rest; and the mention of Father Sibilla involves a brief account of the order of Barefooted Trinitarians from January, 1198, to the spring of 1853! There is a frequent repetition of the same idea with scarcely any verbal change: _un dos d'amateur_ in _Renée Mauperin_ and _le dos du cocher_ in _Germinie Lacerteux_. And the possibilities of the human back were evidently not exhausted, for at Christmas, 1882, Edmond de Goncourt makes a careful note of the _dos de jeune fille du peuple_.
It is by no means an accident that the most frequent theme of the brothers is illness: the insanity of Demailly, the tortures of Germinie, the consumption of Madame Gervaisais, the decay of Renée Mauperin, the record of pain in _Soeur Philomène_, in _Les Frères Zemganno_, and in other works of the Goncourts. Emotion in less tragic circumstances they rarely convey; and when they attempt it they are prone to stumble into an unimpressive sentimentalism. Their strength lay in pure observation, not in the philosophic or psychological presentment of nature. For their fine powers to have full play, it was necessary that they should deal with things seen: in other words, that feeling should take a concrete shape. Once this condition is fulfilled, they can focus their own impressions and render them with unsurpassable skill. We shall find in them nothing epic, nothing inventive on a grand scale: the transfiguring, ennobling vision of the greatest creators was denied them. But they remain consummate masters in their own restricted province: delicate observers of externals, noting and remembering with unmatched exactitude every detail of gesture, attitude, intonation, and expression. The description of landscape--of the Bois de Vincennes in _Germinie Lacerteux_, the Forest of Fontainebleau in _Manette Salomon_, or of the Trastevere quarter in _Madame Gervaisais_--commonly affords them an occasion for a triumph; but the description of prolonged malady gives them a still greater opportunity. Nor is this due simply to the fact that they, who had never known what it was to enjoy a day of perfect health, spoke from an intimate knowledge of the subject. Each landscape preserves at least its abstract idiosyncrasy; illness is an essentially "typical" state in which individual characteristics diminish till they finally disappear. And it is especially in the portraiture of types, rather than of individuals, that the genius of the Goncourts excels.
In their own opinion, their initiative extended over a vast field and in all directions. They seriously maintained that they were the first to introduce the poor into French fiction, the first to awaken the sentiment of pity for the wretched; they admitted the priority of Dickens, but they apparently forgot that they had likewise been anticipated by George Sand--that George Sand whose merits it took them twenty years to recognise. They forgot, too, that compassion is precisely the quality in which they were most lacking. Gavarni had killed the sentiment of pity in them, and had communicated to them his own mocking, sardonic spirit of inhumanity, his sinister delight in every manifestation of cruelty, baseness, and pain. In their most candid moods they confessed that they were all brain and no heart, that they were without real affections; and their writings naturally suffer from this unsympathetic attitude. But when every deduction is made, it is impossible to deny their importance and significance. For they represent a distinct stage in an organized movement--the reaction against romanticism in the novel and lyrism in the theatre. And there is some basis for their bold assertion that they led the way in every other development of the modern French novel. They believed that they had founded the naturalistic school in _Germinie Lacerteux_, the psychological in _Madame Gervaisais_, the symbolic in _Les Frères Zemganno_, and the satanic in _La Faustin_. It is unnecessary to recognise all these claims in full: to discuss them at all, even if we deny them, is to admit that the Goncourts were men of striking intellectual force, of singular ambition, of exceptionally rich and diverse gifts amounting, at times, to unquestionable genius. If they were unsuccessful in their attempt to create an entire race of beings as real as any on the planet, their superlative talent produced, in the form of novels, invaluable studies of manners and customs, a brilliant series of monographs on the social history of the nineteenth century. And Daudet and M. Zola, and a dozen others whom it would be invidious to name, may be accounted as in some sort their literary descendants.
It is not unnatural that Edmond de Goncourt should have ended by disliking the form of the novel, which he came to regard as an exhausted convention. His pessimism was universal. Art was dying, literature was perishing daily. The almost universal acceptance of Ibsen and of Tolstoi was in itself a convincing symptom of degeneration, if the vogue of the latter writer were not indeed the result of a cosmopolitan plot against the native realistic school. It was some consolation to reflect that, after all, there was more "philosophy" in Beaumarchais than in Ibsen; that the name of Goncourt was held in honour by Scandinavians and Slavs. Yet it could not be denied that, the world over, aristocracy of every kind was breaking down. To the eyes of the surviving Goncourt all the signs of a last great catastrophe grew visible. Mankind was ill, half-mad, and on the road to become completely insane. There were countless indications of intellectual and physical decadence. Sloping shoulders were disappearing; the physique of the peasant was not what it had been; good food was practically unattainable; in a hundred years a man who had once tasted genuine meat would be pointed out as a curiosity. The probability was, that within half a century there would not be a man of letters in the world; the reporter, the interviewer, would have taken possession. As it was, the younger generation of readers no longer rallied to the Goncourts as it had rallied when _Henriette Maréchal_ was first replayed. The weary old man buried himself in memoirs, biographies, books of travel; then turned to his first loves--to Poe and Heine--and found that "we are all commercial travellers compared to them." But, threatened as he was by blindness, despairing as were his presentiments of what the future concealed, his confidence in the durability of his fame and his brother's fame was undimmed. There would always be the select few interested in two such examples of the _littérateur bien né_. There would always be the official historians of literature to take account of them as new, perplexing, elemental forces. There would always be the curious who must turn to the Goncourts for positive information. "Our romances," as the brothers had noted forty years earlier, "will supply the greatest number of facts and absolute truths to the moral history of this century." And Edmond de Goncourt clung to the belief, ending, happily and characteristically enough, by conceiving himself and his brother to be "types," and the best of all types: _le type de l'honnête homme littéraire, du persévérant dans ses convictions, et du contempteur de l'argent_. The praise is deserved. It is a distinction of which greater men might well be proud.
JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
_The Goncourts were the sons of a cavalry officer, commander of a squadron in the Imperial army._ EDMOND _was born at Nancy, on the 26th of May, 1822, and his brother_ JULES _in Paris, on the 17th of December, 1830. They were the grandsons of the deputy of the National Assembly of 1789, Huot de Goncourt. A very close friendship united the brothers from their earliest youth, but it appears to have been in the younger that the irresistible tendency to literature first displayed itself. They were originally drawn almost exclusively to the study of the history of art. They devoted themselves particularly to the close of the eighteenth century, and in their earliest important volumes, "La Révolution dans les Moeurs" (1854), "Histoire de la Société Française pendant la Révolution" (1854), and "Pendant le Directoire" (1855), they invented a new thing, the evolution of the history of an age from the objects and articles of its social existence. They were encouraged to continue these studies further, more definitely concentrating their observations around individuals, and some very curious monographs--made up, as some one said, of the detritus of history--were the result, "Une Voiture de Masques," 1856; "Les Actrices (Armande)," 1856; "Sophie Arnauld," 1857. The most ingenious efforts of the brothers in this direction were, however, concentrated upon "Portraits Intimes du XVIIIe Siècle," 1857-'58, and upon the "Histoire de Marie Antoinette," 1858.
Towards 1860 the Goncourts closed their exclusively historical work, and transferred their minute observation and excessively meticulous treatment of small aspects of life to realistic romance. Their first novel, "Les Hommes de Lettres," 1860 (now known as "Charles Demailly"), showed some lack of ease in using the new medium, but it was followed by "Soeur Philomène," 1861, one of the most finished of their fictions, and this by "Renée Mauperin," 1864; "Germinie Lacerteux," 1864; "Manette Salomon," 1867; and "Madame Gervaisais," 1869. Meanwhile, numerous studies of the art of the bibelot appeared under the name of the two Goncourts, and in particular their great work on "L'Art du XVIIIe Siècle," which began to be published in 1859, although not completed until 1882. All this while, moreover, they were secretly composing their splenetic "Journal." On the 20th of June, 1870, the fair companionship was broken by the death of Jules de Goncourt, and for some years Edmond did no more than complete and publish certain artistic works which had been left unfinished. Of these, the most remarkable were, a monograph on the life and work of Gavarni, 1873; a compilation called "L'Amour au XVIIIe Siècle," 1875; studies of the Du Barry, the Pompadour, and the Duchess of Châteauroux, 1878-'79 (these three afterward united in one volume as "Les Maîtresses de Louis XV"); and notes of a tour in Italy, 1894.
Edmond de Goncourt, however, after several years of silence, returned alone to the composition of prose romance. He published in 1877 "La Fille Élisa," an ultra-realistic tragedy of low life. In 1878, in the very curious story of two mountebanks, "Les Frères Zemganno," he betrayed the secret of his own perennial sorrow. Two more novels, "La Faustin," 1882, and "Chérie," the pathetic portrait of a spoiled child, close the series of his works in fiction. He returned to a close examination of the history of art, and published_ catalogues raisonnés _of the entire work of Watteau (1875) and of Prud'hon (1876). His latest interests were centred around the classical Japanese designers, and he published elaborate monographs on Outamaro (1891) and Hokousaï (1896). In 1885 he collected the Letters of his brother Jules, and issued from 1887 to 1896, in nine volumes, as much as has hitherto been published of the celebrated "Journal des Goncourts."
Edmond de Goncourt died while on a visit to Alphonse Daudet, at Champrosay, the country-house of the latter, on the 16th of July, 1896. He left his considerable fortune, which included valuable collections of bibelots, mainly for the purpose of endowing an Academy of Prose Literature, in opposition to the French Academy. In spite of extreme hostility from the members of his family, and innumerable legal difficulties, this "Académie des Goncourts" was formed, on what seems to be a secure basis, in 1901, and M. Joris Karl Huysmans was elected its first president._
E. G.
CONTENTS
PAGES
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt v-xxix _James Fitzmaurice-Kelly_
Lives of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt xxxi-xxxiii _Edmund Gosse_
Renée Mauperin 1-349
The Portraits of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt 351-367 _Octave Uzanne_
RENÉE MAUPERIN
I
"You don't care about society, then, mademoiselle?"
"You won't tell any one, will you?--but I always feel as though I've swallowed my tongue when I go out. That's the effect society has on me. Perhaps it is that I've had no luck. The young men I have met are all very serious, they are my brother's friends--quotation young men, I call them. As to the girls, one can only talk to them about the last sermon they have heard, the last piece of music they have learned, or their last new dress. Conversation with my contemporaries is somewhat restricted."
"And you live in the country all the year round, do you not?"
"Yes, but we are so near to Paris. Is the piece good they have just been playing at the Opéra Comique? Have you seen it?"
"Yes, it's charming--the music is very fine. All Paris was at the first night--I never go to the theatre except on first nights."
"Just fancy, they never take me to any theatre except the Opéra Comique and the Français, and only to the Français when there is a classical piece on. I think they are terribly dull, classical pieces. Only to think that they won't let me go to the Palais Royal! I read the pieces though. I spent a long time learning 'The Mountebanks' by heart. You are very lucky, for you can go anywhere. The other evening my sister and my brother-in-law had a great discussion about the Opera Ball. Is it true that it is quite impossible to go to it?"
"Impossible? Well----"
"I mean--for instance, if you were married, would you take your wife, just once, to see it?"
"If I were married I would not even take----"
"Your mother-in-law. Is that what you were going to say? Is it so dreadful--really?"
"Well, in the first place, the company is----"
"Variegated? I know what that's like. But then it's the same everywhere. Every one goes to the Marche and the company is mixed enough there. One sees ladies, who are rather queer, drinking champagne in their carriages. Then, too, the Bois de Boulogne! How dull it is to be a _young person_, don't you think so?"
"What an idea! Why should it be? On the contrary, it seems to me----"
"I should like to see you in my place. You would soon find out what a bore it is to be always proper. We are allowed to dance, but do you imagine that we can talk to our partner? We may say 'Yes,' 'No,' 'No,' 'Yes,' and that's all! We must always keep to monosyllables, as that is considered proper. You see how delightful our existence is. And for everything it is just the same. If we want to be very proper we have to act like simpletons; and for my part I cannot do it. Then we are supposed to stop and prattle to persons of our own sex. And if we go off and leave them and are seen talking to men instead--oh, well, I've had lectures enough from mamma about that! Reading is another thing that is not at all proper. Until two years ago I was not allowed to read the serials in the newspaper, and now I have to skip the crimes in the news of the day, as they are not quite proper.
"Then, too, with the accomplishments we are allowed to learn, we must not go beyond a certain average. We may learn duets and pencil drawing, but if we want anything more, why, it's affectation on our part. I go in for oil-painting, for instance, and that is the despair of my family. I ought only to paint roses and in water-colours. There's quite a current here, though, isn't there? I can scarcely stand."
This was said in an arm of the Seine just between Briche and the Île Saint Denis. The girl and the young man who were conversing were in the water. They had been swimming until they were tired, and now, carried along by the current, they had caught hold of a rope which was fastened to one of the large boats stationed along the banks of the island. The force of the water rocked them both gently at the end of the tight, quivering rope. They kept sinking and then rising again. The water was beating against the young girl's breast; it filled out her woollen bathing-dress right up to the neck, while from behind little waves kept dashing over her which a moment later were nothing but dewdrops hanging from her ears.
She was rather higher up than the young man and had her arms out of the water, her wrists turned round in order to hold the rope more firmly, and her back against the black wood of the boat. Instinctively she kept drawing back as the young man, swayed by the strong current, approached her. Her whole attitude, as she shrank back, suspended from the rope, reminded one of those sea goddesses which sculptors carve upon galleys. A slight tremor, caused partly by the cold and partly by the movement of the river, gave her something of the undulation of the water.
"Ah, now this, for instance," she continued, "cannot be at all proper--to be swimming here with you. If we were at the seaside it would be quite different. We should have just the same bathing costumes as these, and we should come out of a bathing-van just as we have come out of the house. We should have walked across the beach just as we have walked along the river bank, and we should be in the water to the same depth, absolutely like this. The waves would roll us about as this current does, but it would not be the same thing at all; simply because the Seine water is not proper! Oh, dear! I'm getting so hungry--are you?"
"Well, I fancy I shall do justice to dinner."
"Ah! I warn you that I eat."
"Really, mademoiselle?"
"Yes, there is nothing poetical about me at meal-times. If you imagine that I have no appetite you are quite mistaken. You are in the same club as my brother-in-law, are you not?"
"Yes, I am in M. Davarande's club."
"Are there many married men in it?"
"Yes, a great many."
"How odd! I cannot understand why a man marries. If I had been a man it seems to me that I should never have thought of marrying."
"Fortunately you are a woman."
"Ah, yes, that's another of our misfortunes, we women cannot stay unmarried. But will you tell me why a man joins a club when he is married?"
"Oh, one has to be in a club--especially in Paris. Every man of any standing--if only for the sake of going in there for a smoke."
"What! do you mean to say that there are any wives nowadays without smoking-rooms? Why, I would allow--yes, I would allow a halfpenny pipe!"
"Have you any neighbours?"
"Oh, we don't visit much. There are the Bourjots at Sannois, we go there sometimes."
"Ah, the Bourjots! But, here, there cannot be any one to visit."
"Oh, there's the curé. Ha! ha! the first time he dined with us he drank the water in his finger-bowl! Oh, I ought not to tell you that, it's too bad of me--and he's so kind. He's always bringing me flowers."
"You ride, don't you, mademoiselle? That must be a delightful recreation for you."
"Yes, I love riding. It is my one pleasure. It seems to me that I could not do without that. What I like above everything is hunting. I was brought up to that in the part of the world where papa used to live. I'm desperately fond of it. I was seven hours one day in my saddle without dismounting."