Pages from the Goncourt Journals

The Goncourt brothers were snobs, egotists, misogynists, reactionaries, and not, as it turned out, the immortal novelists they desperately hoped they would be, but their words (and those they recorded of their friends) may nevertheless live forever, thanks to the diaries they kept together for nearly twenty years (and which Edmond continued for another twenty after Jules's death from syphilis). Lovers of both art and gossip, drawn equally to pleasure and disgust, and interested, in a self-consciously modern way, in every detail of their bohemian lives, the brothers left a compulsively readable record [see an example to the right, or below if you're reading this on your phone] of their witty, catty circle of friends (including Flaubert, Zola, Degas, Baudelaire, Sand, and Rodin) and of their own melancholy, observant days.