Renèe Mauperin

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A most authoritative critic, M. Brunetiere, has laid it down that there is more truth, more fidelity to the facts of actual life, in any single romance by Ponson du Terrail or by Gaboriau than in all the works of the Goncourts put together, and so long as we leave truth undefined, this opinion may be as tenable as any other. But it may be well to observe at the outset that the creative work of the Goncourts is not to be condemned or praised en bloc, for the simple reason that it is not a spontaneous, uniform product, but the resultant of diverse forces varying in direction and intensity from time to time. They themselves have recorded that there are three distinct stages in their intellectual evolution. Beginning, under the influence of Heine and Poe, with purely imaginative conceptions, they rebounded to the extremest point of realism before determining on the intermediate method of presenting realistic pictures in a poetic light. Pure imagination in the domain of contemporary fiction seemed to them defective, inasmuch as its processes are austerely logical, while life itself is compact of contradictions; and their

xv first reaction from it was entirely natural, on their own principles. It remains to-be seen what sense should be attached to the formula — la recherche du vrai en litterature — in which they summarized their position as regards their predecessors.

Obviously we have to deal with a question of interpretation. The Goncourts did not — could not — pretend that they were the first to introduce truth into literature: they merely professed to have attained it by a different xoute. The innovation for which they claimed credit is a matter of method, of technique. Their deliberate purpose is to surprise us by the fidelity of their studies, to captivate and convince us by an accumulation of exact minutiae: in a word, to prove that truth is more interesting than fiction. So history should be written, and so they wrote it. First and last, whatever form they chose, they remained historians. Alleging the example set by Plutarch and Saint-Simon, they make their histories of the eighteenth century a mine of anecdote, a pageant of picturesque situations. State-papers, blue-books, ministerial despatches, are in their view the conventional means used for hoodwinking simpletons and forwarding the interests of a triumphant faction. The most valuable historical material is, as they believed, to be sought in the autograph letter. They held that the secret of the craftiest intriguer will escape him, despite himself, in the expansion of confidential correspon-

xvi dence. The research for such correspondence is to be supplemented by the study of sculpture, paintings, engravings, furniture, broadsides, bills — all of them indispensable for the reconstruction of a past age and for the right understanding of its psychology. But these means are simply complementary. The chief vehicle of authentic truth is the autograph letter, and, though they professed to hold the historical novel in abhorrence, they applied their historical methods to their records of contemporary life. Thus we inevitably arrive at the famous theory of the document humain — a phrase received with much derision when first publicly used in the preface to La Faustin, and a theory conscientiously adopted by many later novelists. And here, again, it is important to realize the restricted extent of the authors' claim.

The Goncourts draw a broad, primary distinction between ancient and modern literature: the first deals mainly with generalities, the second with details. They then proceed to establish an analogous distinction between novels written before and after Balzac's time, the modern novel being based on des documents racontes, ou releves d'apres nature, precisely as formal history is based on des documents Serifs. But they make no pretence of having initiated the revolution; their share was limited to continuing Balzac's tradition, to enlarging the field of observation, and especially to multiplying the instruments of research.

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They declared that Gautier had, so to say, endowed literature with vision; that Fromentin, in describing the silence of the desert, had revealed the literary value of hearing; that with Zola, Loti — and they might surely have added Maupassant — a fresh sense was brought into play: c'est le nez qui entre en scene. Their personal contribution was their nervous sensi- / bility: les premiers nous avons ete les ecrivains des nerfs. And they were prouder of this morbid quality than of their talent. They were ever on the watch for fragments of talk caught up in drawing-rooms, in restaurants, on omnibuses: ever ready to take notes at death-beds, church, or taverns. Their life was one long pursuit of Vimprevu, le decousu, Villogique du vrai. These observations they transcribed at night while the impression was still acute, and these they utilized more or less deftly as they advanced towards what they rightly thought to be the goal of art: the perfect adjustment of proportion between the real and the imagined.

It would seem that we are now in a position to judge the Goncourts by their own standard. Le dosage juste de la litterature et de la vie — this formula recurs in one shape or another as a leading principle, and it is supplemented by other still more emphatic indications which should serve to supply a test. Unhappily, with the Goncourts these indications are unsystematic and even contradictory. The elder brother

xviii has naturally no hesitation in saying that the highest gift of any writer is his power of creating on paper real beings — comme des etres crees par Dieu, et conime ayant etc tine vraie vie stir la terre — and he is bold enough to add that Shakespeare himself has failed to create more than two or three personages. He protests energetically against the academic virtues, and insists on the importance of forming a personal style which shall reproduce the vivacity, brio, and feverish activity of the best talk. It is, then, all the more disconcerting to learn from another passage in the Journal that the creation of characters and the discovery of an original form of expression are matters of secondary moment. The truth is that if the Goncourts had, as they believed, something new to say, it was inevitable that they should seek to invent a new manner of utterance. Renan was doubtless right in thinking that they were absolutely without ideas on abstract subjects; but they were exquisitely susceptible to every shade and tone of concrete objects, and the endeavour to convey their innumerable impressions taxed the resources of that French vocabulary on whose relative poverty they so often insist. The reproaches brought against them in the matter of verbal audacities by every prominent critic, from Sainte-Beuve in one camp to Pontmartin in the other, are so many testimonies to the fact that they were innovators — apporteurs du neuf — and that their B xix intrepidity cost them dear. Still their boldness in this respect has been generally exaggerated. Setting out as imitators of two such different models as Gautier and Jules Janin, they slowly acquired an individual manner — the manner, say, of Germinie Lacerteux or Manette Salomon — but they never attained the formula which they had conceived as final. It was not given to them to realize their ambition — to write novels which should not contain a single bookish expression, plays which should reveal that hitherto undiscoverable quantity — colloquial speech, raised to the level of consummate art. The famous ecriture artiste remained an unfulfilled ideal. The expression, first used in the preface to Les Freres Zemganno, merely foreshadows a possible development of style which shall come into being when realism or naturalism, ceasing to describe the ignoble, shall occupy itself with the attempt to render refinements, reticences, subtleties, and half-tones of a more elusive order. It is an aspiration, a counsel of perfection offered to a younger school by an artist in experiment, who declares the quest to be beyond his powers. It is nothing more.

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

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Demailly, Madame Gervaisais, Manette Salomon, Renee Mauperin, Soeur Philomene, 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, Lamperiere, Remontville, Boisroger, and Montbaillard are, as often as not, verbatim reports of paradoxes and epigrams thrown off a few hours earlier by Theophile 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 remindeu :hem of pictures, so did every other .rnanifestation of existence present itself as a possible subject for artistic treatment. They

xxi 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, Mile, de Courmont, is the model of Mile, 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 creatures de ce temps is sketched from their father's old political ally, Colardez, at Breuvannes; the original of the Abbe Blampoix in Renee Mauperin was the Abbe 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

xxii 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, Vincarnation oVun age, de son sexe et d'un role de son temps; Langibout is le type pur de Vancienne ecole; 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 jmother; Renee is the type of the modern bourgeoise girl; the Bourjots "represent " wealth; Denoisel is a Parisian — ou plntot c'etait le Parisien. The Goncourts, in their endeavour to be more precise, resort to odd combinations of conflicting elements. Within some twenty pages Renee Mauperin is une melancoliqne tintamarresque; the adjectives bourgeoise and diabolique are used to characterize the same thing; the Abbe Blampoix is at once " priest and lawyer, apostle and diplomatist, Fenelon and M. de Foy." And the same types constantly reappear. The physician Monterone in Madame Gervaisais is simply an Italian version of Denoisel in Renee Mauperin ; the Abbe Blampoix has his counterpart 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,

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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 y amateur in Renee Mauperin and le dos du cocker 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 Renee Mauperin, the record of pain in Soeur Philomene, in Les Freres 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 conjcr£te_-sliap£. 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

xxiv 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

XXV 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 Freres 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 superla-

xxvi tive 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

xxvii 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 Marechal 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 litterateur bien ne. 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

xxviii of all types: le type de Vhonnete homme litter aire, du perseverant dans ses convictions, et du contempteur de Vargent. The praise is deserved. It is a distinction of which greater men might well be proud.

James Fitzmaurice-Kelly.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The Goncoarts were the sons of a cavalry officer, commander of a squadron in the Imperial army. Edmond zvas born at Nancy, on the 26th of May, 1822, and his brother Jules in Paris, on the i/th 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 Revolution dans les Mceurs" {1854), " ' Histoire de la Societe Frangaise pendant la Revolution" (1854), an & "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 Ar-

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Biographical Note nauld," 1857. The most ingenious efforts of the brothers in this direction were, however, concentrated upon " Portraits Intimes du XVIII e Siecle," 1857-58, and upon the " Histoire de Marie Antoinette/' 1858.

Towards i860 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" i860 {now known as "Charles Demailly"), showed some lack of ease in using the new medium, but it was followed by " Sceur Philomene," 1861, one of the most finished of their fictions, and this by " Renee Mauperin" 1864; " Germinie Lacerteux," 1864; " Manette Salomon," 1867 ; and " Madame Gervaisais," i860. Meanwhile, numerous studies of the art of the bibelot appeared under the name of the two Goncourts, and in particular their great zvork on " L'Art du XVIII e Siecle," which began to be published in 185P, 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 " V Amour au XVIJI e Siecle," 1875; studies of the Du Barry, the Pompadour, and the Duchess of Chdteauroux, 1878-70 (these three afterward united in one volume as "Les Mattresses de Louis XV ") ; and notes of a tour in Italy, 1804.

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Biographical Note

Edmond de Goncourt, however, after several years of silence, returned alone to the composition of prose romance. He published in 1877 " La Fille Elisa," an ultrarealistic tragedy of low life. In 18/8, in the very curious story of two mountebanks, " Les Frczzs^Zenganno," he betrayed the secret of his own perennial sorrow. Tzvo more novels, " La Faustin," 1882, and " Chcric," 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 raisonnes of the entire work of Wattcau (1875) and of Prud'hon (18/6). His latest interests were centred around the classical Japanese designers, and he published elaborate monographs on Outamaro (1891) and Hokousai (1896). In 1885 he collected the Letters of his brother Jules, and issued from 188/ 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 " Academie des Goncourts" was formed, on what seems to be a secure basis, in 1901, and M. J oris Karl Huysmans was elected its first president.

E. G. xxxiii

Contents

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Edmond and Jules de Goncourt . . v-xxix

James Fitzmaurice- Kelly

IV

" A quarter past ten already! " said Mme. Davarande. " We shall only just have time to get to the station. Renee, tell them to bring me my hat."

Every one rose. Barousse woke up from his nap with the noise, and the little band of guests from Paris set out for Saint-Denis.

" I'll come with you," said Denoisel. " I should like a breath of air."

Barousse was in front, arm-in-arm with Reverchon. The Davarandes followed, and Henri Mauperin and Denoisel brought up the rear.

"Why don't you stay all night? You could go back to Paris to-morrow," Denoisel began.

" No," answered Henri, " I won't do that. I have some work to do to-morrow morning. I should get to Paris late and my day would be wasted."

They were silent, and every now and then a few words from Barousse to Reverchon in praise of Renee came to them through the silence of the night.

" I say, Denoisel, I'm afraid it is all up with that, don't you think so? "

" Yes, I think it is."

" Oh, dear! Will you tell nie, my dear fellow, what made you humour Renee in all the nonsense that came into her head this evening? You have a great deal of influence over her and "

" My dear boy," answered Denoisel, puffing at his cigar, " you must let me give you a social, philosophical, and historical parenthesis. We have quite finished, have we not, and when I say we, I mean the majority of the French people, with the pretty little young ladies who used to talk like mechanical dolls. They could say • papa ' and ' mamma,' and when they went to a dance they never lost sight of their parents. The little childlike young lady who was always so timid and bashful and who used to blush and stammer, brought up to be ignorant of everything, neither knowing how to stand up on her legs nor how to sit down on a chair — all that sort of thing's done with, old-fashioned, worn out. That was the marriageable young lady of the days of the Gymnase Theatre. There is nothing of that kind nowadays. The process of culture has changed; it used to be a case of the fruit-wall, but at present the young person grows in the open. We ask a girl now about her impressions and we expect her to say what she thinks naturally and originally. She is allowed to talk, and indeed is expected to talk, about everything, as that is the accepted thing now. She need no longer act sweet simplicity, but native intelligence. If only she can shine in society her parents are delighted. Her mother takes her to classes. If she should have any talent it is encouraged and cultivated. Instead of ordinary governesses she must have good masters, professors from the Conservatoire, or artists whose pictures have been hung. She goes in for being an artist and every one is delighted. Come, now, isn't that the way girls are being educated now in middle-class society? '

" And the result? "

" Now, then," continued Denoisel without answering the question, " in the midst of this education, which I am not criticising, remember — in the midst of all this, let us imagine a father who is an excellent sort of man, goodness and kindness personified, encouraging his daughter in her new freedom by his weakness and his worship of her. Let us suppose, for instance, that this father has countenanced all the daring and all the mischievousness of a boy in a woman, that he has allowed his daughter little by little to cultivate manly accomplishments, which he sees with pride and which are after his own heart "

" And you, my dear fellow, who know my sister so well and the way she has been brought up, the style she has gone in for, authorized as she considers herself (thanks to father's indulgence), you, knowing how difficult it is to get her married, allowed her to do all kinds of unseemly things this evening when you might have stopped her short with just a few words such as you always find to say and which you alone can say to her? "

The friend to whom Henri Mauperin was speaking, Derioisel, was the son of a compatriot, and old school friend and brother-in-arms of M. Mauperin. The two men had been in the same battles, they had shed their blood in the same places, and during the retreat from Russia they had eaten the same horseflesh.

A year after his return to France, M. Mauperin had lost this friend, who on his death-bed had left him guardian to his son. The boy had found a second father in his guardian. When at college, he had spent all his holidays at Morimond, and he looked upon the Mauperins as his own family.

When M. Mauperin's children came it seemed to the young man that a brother and sister had been just what he had wanted; he felt as though he were their elder brother, and he became a child again in order to be one with them.

His favourite was, of course, Renee, who when quite little began to adore him. She was very lively and self-willed and he alone could make her listen to reason and obey. As she grew up he had been the moulder of her character, the confessor of her intellect, and the director of her tastes. His influence over the young girl had increased day by day as they grew more and more familiar. A room was always kept ready for Denoisel in the house, his place was always kept for him at table, and he came whenever he liked to spend a week with the Mauperins.