Paris in July 2018 - The de Goncourt brothers

I have recently quoted from a book called 365 dagar (365 days) by Anders Bergman & Emilie Perland. There are extracts from famous and not so famous writers of diaries. You meet a lot of different people that you have never heard of before, and they are sometimes fascinating characters. Two of them are the de Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, both naturalism writers.  "They formed a partnership that "is possibly unique in literary history. Not only did they write all their books together, they did not spend more than a day apart in their adult lives, until they were finally parted by Jules's death in 1870."They are known for their literary work and for their diaries, which offer an intimate view into the French literary society of the later 19th century." (Wikipedia)

Edmond (left) with his brother Jules.
Photographed by Félix Nadar (Wikipedia)

Researching the internet, I found this interesting article by Tara Isabella Burton (from 2015) on the brothers in The Paris Review.  Here is a quote from the article:

"Whether or not one is familiar with the poets, novelists, and absintheuses of Haussmannian Paris, to read the Goncourt brothers is to plunge headlong into a world of bitter rivalries and bitterer friendships, in which every gathering around a café table on the Grands Boulevards is a chance to raise one’s status in the byzantine literary hierarchy. “Here,” as Christopher Isherwood put it, “gossip achieves the epigrammatic significance of poetry.” Of course, such a cynical, self-satisfied perspective can grate. André Gide, writing on the Goncourts’ novels, excoriated their style as pathologically shallow—a Perez Hilton of the Passages des Panoramas: “It is impossible to read a page by them where that good opinion they have of themselves does not burst out from between the lines.” 

From the de Goncourt Journal

March 4, 1860

"We have been discussing Hugo's Legendes des Siecles with Flaubert. What specially strikes him about Hugo, who aims at being taken for a thinker, is the absence of thought.
Moliere is a great event in the history of the middle classes; he is a solemn declaration of the
soul of the Third Estate. Corneille is the last of the heralds of the nobility; Moliere is the first poet of the middle classes."

March 30, 1862

"We go up to the fourth floor, at Number 2, rue Racine. A little commonplace man meets us, opens a door, and we are in a very large room, a sort of studio. Against the window at the end, through which a five o'clock twilight is entering, there is a gray shadow in the pale light a woman who does not rise and rests immobile when we greet her. That seated shadow with the sleepy countenance is Mme Sand, and the man who has let us in is the engraver Manceau. Mme Sand looks like an automaton.
She talks in a monotonous and mechanical voice, which neither rises nor falls and never gets animated. Her attitude has something of the gravity, the placidity, the somnolence of a ruminant. Her
movements are slow, very slow, almost like a somnambulist's, and they always lead to the same
thing always with the same methodical actions to the lighting of a wax match and to a cigarette at her mouth."

The extract from the book 365 days for 10 December, 1860 is not present in the extracted journal. Here is a short summary from the Swedish version (my translation):

"On the way out from Odéon, after having seen L'Oncle Million, I meet Flaubert and Bouilhet, surrounded by men in simple material hats, with which they shake hands. Bouilhet is leaving us with the excuse that he is going to the next door café. It seems, that in order to keep a play going in the Odéon, you need to spice it with drinks and hand shakes.

Flaubert tells us, that when he wrote how Madame Bovary was poisoned, he felt a pain in the stomach as if there was a piece of copper. It made him throw up two times. He said that one of the most pleasurable times during writing was when he worked on the end of the novel and was forced to get up and fetch yet another handkerchief, because the one he had was totally wet. All of these things he told us to entertain the bourgeoisie."

Do you find it fascinating to read diaries? Do you have any to recommend. I loved this concept, because the sources are different all the time. It might be a little bit boring to read entries from the same person all the time. It depends of course on the person and what they have to tell.