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death a certain quality has disappeared from what is still styled, by common consent, l'œuvre des de Goncourt," a vigor and picturesque force of expression, and above all the exquisite prose poetry of description noticeable in such works as "Renée Maupevin," and in "Marie Anto nette," which is perhaps at once the most ideal and real presentment of Louis XVI.'s queen ever evolved in modern days, and which will certainly remain the most remarkable volume in the two writers' elaborate reconstruction of the 18th century.

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Cœlio était la bonne partie de moimême," says De Musset's Octave in "Les Caprices de Marianne." ·Elle est remontée au ciel avec lui," and he adds, "Je ne sais point aimer, Calio seul le savait," and so might speak with truth Edmond de Goncourt of his brother and himself.

Be that as it may, Jules had a strange power of drawing affection to himself; all rejoiced in his coming, and sorrowed when he went, from the old family servants, who exclaimed, "Nous allons rire ce soir, Monsieur Jules vient dîner," to the children, who found in him such a delightful playmate, and to whom we owe one of the most charming letters recorded in the child-correspondence of the world. The two brothers had a tender friendship for four little girls, daughters of their friend Camille Maveille, who lived near Chartres, in a house full of roses and eighteenth-century pictures; and these small people wrote a letter in common, a sort of joint Round Robin, in paragraphs divided by a touching refrain, as follows:

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Ah, Monsieur Jules! Ah, Monsieur Jules! How sad we are, how sad we are Juliette is sad, Margaret is sad, Naco is sad; so is my aunt, so is Clementine, Mirga and Nounou. It is the saddest of sadness! Ah, Monsieur Jules !" "No more hide and seek, no more blindman's buff, no walks, no doll's bap tisms, neither sweetmeats, nor tarts à vingt et un." (!)

One curé comes to call; two curés come to call; three curés come to call. Ah, Monsieur Jules !"

"We are working all day; we listen for you in vain, and while we prick up one ear, four cars, six cars, eight ears, inkstand falls to the ground, the copy

the

book tumbles on to the inkstand, and tears drop from our eyes. Ah, Monsieur Jules!"

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Our roast veal is without charm and lacks mushrooms! We don't sleep, we kick, we fall out of bed, and we dream dictation. Ah, Monsieur Jules!"

And so on through a whimsical and untranslatable letter.

And yet one cannot help wondering whether, after all, in spite of the many friendships and good things brought them by their talent and way of life, the younger at least of the De Goncourts would not have been happier leading the regular quiet existence of the average Frenchmar. The following letter addressed to one of his early friends, Louis Parry, gives a curious insight into the mind of one destined afterward to play such a rôle in modern French literature.

"I am sincerely grateful for your advice upon the necessity of taking up a career. I will only say that your exhortations, conjointly with those of my Uncle Jules de Courmont, come a little too late. My resolution is quite fixed and nothing will make me change it, neither sermons Lor counsels, not even yours, who have for me so great a friendship. . . . I know that I thus run the gauntlet of continuous moral remonstrances from

members of my family who are willing to assume the responsibility of my happiness by voted to the reckoning up of figures and the shutting me up in one of those cupboards decopying of letters, which are the conventional resource of all the young men of my social position. But what will you have? I am without ambition. I am a monster, but so it is. The most splendid and best paid place in the world I would not accept, if offered. So far as I am concerned, I consider that those public employments which are so sought after and so overburdened with applicants, are not worth stooping one's spine to obtain. This is my opinion, and as the matter concerns myself, I have a right to hold to it.

"Oh! I know well how you will reply: 'But all the world does something.' My family will say the same thing: Look at all the rest,' But is this a really serious argument? It is exactly as if one tried to dress everybody, little or big, crooked or straightly made, in clothes cut the same size. So-and-so adores adding up; his soul expands before columns of figures; he is happy warming himself at a stove; he reads nothing but newspapers, and all pictures are for him just so many signboards. His family say to him go in and work without pay.' Another has literary tastes, loves painting and all the arts; addstomach, he never when at college could cut ing up numbers give him cramp in the

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any figure in arithmetic; never mind, his family say to him also, Go and be a fifth

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wheel in a Government office.' they don't even consult him.

Sometimes "Henri Heine est mort. C'est une grande mort. Micux eut valu dans la fosse tout le cortège-que le cortegé. Je n'aperçois que des nains pour tendre l'Arc d'Ulysse.

"You will answer that I should find the Foreign Office more tolerable. Very good; for that one must have recommendations, and I have only one uncle to fall back upon, which

uncle is too honest ever to have been able to get anything for his family. However, let us take for granted that I am named Attaché in an Embassy. But, my dear fellow, I had rather be transported right away. I will get you Eduard Lefebure's letters to read; and you'll see how he enjoys himself!

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"Then you will overwhelm me with the antique anathema, Lazzarone, sad is the life which you are going in for ; - Lazzarone !'"'

With the exception of a few light passages, and the happiness which comes to ever true artist with the consciousness of good work done, even if it be unappreciatel by his public, Jules de Goncourt's life seems to have been full of sad disillusions and disappointments, for it was not till just before his death, 1870, that the De Goncourts were acknowledged masters in the art they had professed so long. True they but shared the fate of several who have now come out victorious after years of obscurity, or at least doubtful notoriety; Emile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, etc., but Jules had not their staying power, and died just as fame was approaching the group of whom he had been perhaps the most delicately gifted and clear-visioned-for much of the De Goncourts' early works are but precursors of what now composes

modern French literature.

sence;

Across the pages of the journal, kept day by day by the two brothers, Jules, it seems, oftener holding the pen, fit the varied personalitics which composed the advanced section of the literary Paris of their day. Emile Augier, Octave Feuillet, About, in a word the world of the Academy, are conspicuous by their abbut on the other hand George Sand, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, and Sainte-Beuve are made to live before us with an almost painful reality, not as they posed for le commun des fidèles, or would have sat for their traits for posterity, but as they appeared in daily déshabillé to the shrewd un-idealizing eyes of two keen observers, with whom le vrai had become almost a mania, and yet who could sometimes pay a noble tibute to rival talent or reputation, as witness Jules de Goncourt's fine untranslatable words on Heine, an epitaph summing up admirably the poet and those he left albeit peu tendre.

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The great painter of Parisian manners, Gavarni, was perhaps one of the most intimate friends ever cherished by the De Goncourts; their references to him are many, and he may be said to have been their literary and artistic godfather; till the end of his life he remained closely knit. to them, and perhaps the only faithful though unfortunately little known early portrait of the brothers De Goncourt was due to his pencil. The drawing shows us two young men sitting by one another sideways in profile, then a favorite way of painting or drawing two people; Jules, even then looking worn and thin, has his hair à la Byron, and has his coat cut according to the last mode of '56. Both brothers have the effilé refined look comfrom which they sprang, and they look strangely out of place in this album, heading the series of certain noted journalists of the day; and yet Gavarni had thought to do them great honor in placing them there.

mon to members of the old French noblesse

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pig-tailed perukes. These personages, however, not sufficing to gain the required income, he took to engraving.

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In 1830 he is described by Gautier as having been a charming young man with curly hair, and as particular as an Englishman" about his dress, for he was beginning to earn enough to satisfy his fantasies of costume; and in 1832 he was in full swing, and published his " Physiognomies de la Population de Paris;" the people, the soldiers, the children, the fishwives, the policemen, the Parisiennes, grandes dames and bourgeoises, indoor and out, in curl-papers and in ball dresses, yawning, laughing, asleep, awake, the bourgeois gentilshommes, and the gentilshommes bourgeois, the vagabonds making oratorical poses in the police court, etc. Gavarni seized them all, and his fame spread far and wide.

In 1847 he came to London, where he seems to have been quite anxiously expected. At that time our social links with Paris were very close. But in England he did not get on very well; though he was most intelligently interested in London. He snubbed Thackeray, who came full of zeal to invite him to dinner; he actually missed, without any excuse, an appointment to sketch the Queen, who in common with Prince Albert had the highest admiration for his genius; he was further-horrid thought-said to have declared that an English lady in full dress was like a Cathedral; and finally he went off at a tangent on scientific notions, and, although the most sober of men, took what the De Goncourts whimsically call "le gin du pays," to stimulate his researches into the higher mathematics ! It was high time for him to get back to France, after an absence of something like two years, during which time the Orleans monarchy had been replaced by the Republic and the Prince President. It was at the end of 1851 that the two young De Goncourts first saw Gavarni and found him deep in water color painting and Cartesian Philosophy. Ile took to them with great kindness, told them of all his adventures, and initiated them into all his theories and ideals, apparently believing in nothing but mathematics, essaying in vain to wring out the answer of the universe from what he called "the music of numbers." In fact, after the death of his favorite son, the little Jean constantly referred to in

Jules de Goncourt's correspondence, his intellect took an extraordinary turn; he would discourse on scholastic philosophy, and Louis Veuillot, by no means with disapproval. It seemed to be the only train of thought on which his mind could dwell with interest, if not with belief.

He lived until November 1866, in a sad strange old age which his remaining son Pierre seemed unable to brighten; the last time he was seen by the De Goncourts he was "mathematiquant" in the middle of a heap of books. He left behind him ten thousand drawings, the manifold pieces of the Euvre, by which he had delighted France for nearly half a century; but he had outlived his popularity, and was sincerely mourned by none save the two young littérateurs to whom he had proved so good a friend.

It was Gavarni who with Sainte-Beuve inaugurated the diners Magny. Here, twice a month, a group of literary men, comprising, as time went on, all the De Goncourts' familiars, met and dined" à la bonne franquette, discussing freely one another and those outside the charmed circle, little knowing or recking that they were making future" copy," or at least furnishing materials for the most curious memoirs ever published in France, if we except some of the mediæval journals and diaries, which, after all, though equally frank, were not published during the lifetime of their authors, or at least of those mentioned in their pages with praise or blame.

Lightly posed, and yet sketched with no uncertain hand, the band of men and women who built up and "invented," to translate an expressive French idiom, what will go down as modern French literature, pass before us. Flaubert, who spent four years in writing one short novel, and that novel "Salammbo;" and who in the intervals of hard silent work would sit on a divan, his feet crossed Turkish fashion, confiding to all and any who would listen the plot and incidents of a study of modern Eastern life-destined never to be even begun by him-or again throwing aside the eternal cigarette, from whose curling spiral of smoke he pretended to evolve the strange fantasies which lent to his conversation such curious charm, in order to dance a grotesque pas seul, dubbed by its originator "l'Idiot des Salons," and apparently intended to be taken as a mon

strous parody of the respectable bourgeois sinugness which the author of "Madame Bovary" and his colleagues so abhorred.

In those

We catch glimpses of a young struggling Zola at Magny's, where his undoubt ed genius and strange power seems to have been an accepted fact long before his work had even acquired the notoriety which in France so often precedes fame. days the Apostle of Realism was a sallow wiry jeune, writing newspaper articles to keep body and soul together, while elaborating the finest novels of the Rougon Macquart series. But the chief of the party was Théophile Gautier, the most powerful and self-assertive of them all, never so happy apparently as when engaged in loud discussion with Sainte-Beuve or Taine on the merits or demerits of their respective gods, Balzac, Homer, and Racine, yet devoted to the two pretty young daughters who kept house for him in the sombre ill-furnished house at Neuilly. There the Sultan de l'Epithète," as some one happily designated him, spent his idle hours. His work he did in the offices of the Moniteur, seeming only able to write under the impulsion of knowing that a printer's devil lay in wait round every corner, and seeing, as he wrote,

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the copy" come back in proof line by line, for in no other fashion would or did the great critic ever produce his articles.

One fine day, early in the sixties, the brothers received a card inviting them to assist at a "petite fête de famille," to take place in Mdlle. Gautier's own rooms. There they find some thirty guests assembled in front of a miniature stage, of which the youthful Puvis de Chavannes, to-day President of the Second Salon, has been the zealous scene-painter. The piece played is entitled "Pierrot Posthume," in France an ever-new theme. Judith, the eldest of the three children, and with even then a strange delight in Oriental lore, looks graceful as Esmeralda; Estelle is a dainty Harlequin; their brother a somewhat solemn Pierrot perhaps a thought too posthume, some friend remarks-and Théophile Gautier himself marvellously plays Pantaloon, the young est, merriest, wittiest of them all, and throwing himself with abundant zeal into the fun.

One evening, Tourguenieff is welcomed, an honored guest, by the Magny diners

"He looks like a gentle giant with his

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white hair and his eyes have borrowed some of the soft bright blue of the sky. . . Touched perhaps by our greeting, he begins to talk of Russian literature, which he declares to be drifting toward realism, both as regards fiction and the Theatre. He tells us that the Russians are great readers of reviews, and seems ashamed of owning that he and some ten others are actually paid 609 fr. the page. On the other hand, a book only brings in about 4000 fr. ;" and he goes on to say that there is but one foreign writer popular in Russia, and that is-Dickens. How the world has changed!

Neither of the brothers ever became intimate with George Sand, though she had a sincere admiration for their work. Introduced to this famous lady confrère by the engraver Manceau, their first impression was curiously unpleasant.

"A seated shadow, who remains apparently unconscious of our presence and salutations. ... Madame Sand has an automatic air, she speaks in a monotonous and mechanical voice which is never raised or lowered in tone. . . .” Manceau, who apparently considered the authoress of La Mare au Diable" a kind of show, which perhaps explained her attitude, informs the De Goncourts that her powers of work are prodigious, and that nothing disturbs her. Yes," says Madame Sand, "there is nothing praiseworthy in that, for writing has always been very easy

to me.

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And later on comes an account of a visit to Nohant, given by Gautier at one of the Magny dinners, and which gives a curious side-light on George Sand's home life.

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The food was good, but we had too much game and poultry, also Madame Calamatta and Alexander Dumas fils. . . . Lunch is at ten o'clock. . . . Madame Sand walks in, looking like the Somnambula, and remains sleepy through the whole meal . . . then we went into the garden, and this woke her up somewhat. We had some general conversation about the way in which certain words should be pronounced—ailleurs and meilleur, for instance. . . . Not a word touching on the relation of the sexes; you would probably be shown the door if you dared to allude to such a thing. . . . At three o'clock Madame Sand sets to her copy again till six. Dinner is hurried through in order to give Marie Caillot time to dine

-she is the maid-servant, a petite Fadette adopted by Mme. Sand. After dinner Mme. Sand plays 'patience' till midnight without saying a word. .. Well, after a day or two I could stand it no longer, and so suddenly declared that Rousseau had been the worst writer the world had known, and this produced a discussion which lasted till one o'clock in the morning."

Certainly her malicious confrère knew how to avenge the dull hours George Sand had made him spend in, her beloved Nohant, and yet at that time ('62) the Marquis de Villemer" was still unwritten, proving what a latent power there must have been in this quiet somnolent

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woman.

Through all these curious volumes, full of a painful disillusionment which intensifies as time goes on, stripping bare first both brothers and then the remaining one, of the natural affections and beliefs common to us all, one gracious and charming personality flits to and fro, ever bringing an element of brightness and cheery kindness into the lives of all those around. The Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, to whom constant references are made in the "Journal des Goncourt," seems to have played the part of fairy godmother to French men of letters during the Third Empire; indeed it was admittedly due to her influence that such men as Flaubert, Gautier, the De Goncourts, not to mention Sainte-Beuve, threw what influence they possessed all on the side of what was then Law and Order.

On one occasion, however, Princess Mathilde's friendship did the brothers an evil turn. "Henriette Maréchal," a strangely unequal play, but one which undoubtedly foreshadowed the modern dramatic school, and brought out, as none of their previous work had done, the rare powers of modern psychological observation possessed by the two authors, was blackballed by the Comédie Française; ostensibly on account of the subject-certainly a singularly unpleasant one-but more probably because with Emile Augier, Dumas fils, and Octave Feuillet, to say nothing of De Musset, the Théâtre Française was rather suffering from embarras de richesses, and had no desire for eccentric and startling additions to its repertoire.

Suddenly a message from the Emperor

led the Comédie to reconsider its decision, "Henriette Maréchal" was put into rehearsal, with the best actors and actresses of the day in the principal rôles, and MM. de Goncourt had nothing left but to express their gratitude to their energetic and all-powerful friend at Court. But it had gone forth in the Student's quarter that a dull ill-constructed play was going to be played at the National Theatre, in order to please a Princess; the Quartier Latin descended on the Palais Royal with whistles, rattles, and, what was more to the purpose, some fifty strong young voices determined to howl down the official play. The ringleader, a young gentleman known as Pipe en bois, wrote a witty epistle to the authors of the piece, which somehow got into all the anti-governmental organs, and practically obliged the Director of the Comédie Française to withdraw "Henriette Maréchal." This, after Got, Delaunay, Mme. Arnould Duplesis, etc., had five times tried in vain to make the public at least hear their play, which was spoken of with admiration and even enthusiasm by the leading critics of the day, including two such different men as Jules Janin and Gautier.

Some twenty years later the same public, grown presumably older and wiser under the beneficent influence of the Republic, applauded "Henriette Maréchal" to the echo; but only one of the two authors was present to enjoy the triumph, and receive the congratulations of friends and critics. Such are the ironies of fate; for it is recognized that Jules de Goncourt had given some of his best thought to this comedy, if it can be so styled, containing as it does the mot profond which sums up what the whole of modern literature from Balzac downward is always trying to express. In "Henriette Maréchal," the hero, Paul de Breville, says: "Çà finit donc l'amour, Louise?" but no answer is Vouchsafed to the question.

Even before Jules's death there had been question of what one must call, for want of a better name, an Académie de Goncourt. The brothers ever retained a vivid remembrance of their own early struggles, and of those of their friends who, even more unfortunate than themselves, saw themselves absolutely obliged to "potboil," if I may be pardoned the phrase, in order to live while masterpieces slumbered in their brains. It was with

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