Published July 6, 2026
Novelists, playwrights, and historians, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (1822–1896 and 1830–1870) were also the supreme chroniclers of the Parisian literary and artistic life of their time. The diary that the brothers kept from the eve of the 1851 publication of their first novel (written in concert, like most of their works) appeared in nine volumes between 1886 and 1896. A virtuoso performance in higher gossip, the Journal records the misadventures of some of the leading writers of the age, with the Goncourts at the center of the circle of companions, which encompassed Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Ernest Renan, Théophile Gautier, Alphonse and Ernest Daudet, Hippolyte Taine, and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Encounters with such outlying geniuses as Charles Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin decorate the edges of the design.
These men served as priests of the religion of high art, devoting their lives to work that the multitude could never fully appreciate. Art alone was holy; faith in something so ridiculous as God or the immortality of the soul was fair game. Flaubert works fifteen-hour days for two straight months, carving one perfect sentence fastidiously after another to produce a thirty-page story: “Un cœur simple,” about a woman whose pious confusion evokes a deathbed visitation from an immense stuffed parrot, once a beloved pet, that she takes for the Holy Spirit. Flaubert is endlessly fascinated by the Marquis de Sade, whose unspeakable perversions naturally give his admirer the opportunity to mock the religion he despises: “He is the last word in Catholicism . . . [He] is the spirit of the Inquisition, the spirit of torture, the spirit of the medieval Church, the horror of nature.” Sainte-Beuve in café conversation with Baudelaire delivers “a tirade on atheism in comparison with which the most blasphemous eighteenth-century pamphlet would read like the Gospel according to St. John.” The scurrilous abuse of God, at top volume, brings every game of dominoes in the place to a sudden halt.
In 1889, Edmond and Zola exult and commiserate “about our lives which we had sacrificed to literature as perhaps nobody had ever sacrificed his life before, and we admitted to each other that we had been real ‘martyrs to literature’ and also perhaps ‘damn fools.’” Zola, a married man about to turn fifty, confesses that he feels a pang whenever he passes a pretty woman, thinking, “Isn’t that worth more than a book?” Ten years earlier Zola had “complained of being haunted by the desire to go to bed with a young girl—not a child, but a girl who was not yet a woman.” The legal consequences of this untoward lust engage his imagination: “I see the Assize Court and all the rest of it.” These reflections sober him up and subdue his ruinous urges.
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Algis Valiunas is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis, a journal about the ethical, political, and social implications of modern science technology.
