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Updated: June 14, 2025
Flaubert is the most noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. I mean the Novel of sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary.
When Princess Marie was called to the throne of France, she found herself transported from one of the most penurious and obscure to the most splendid of the Courts of Europe "frightened and overwhelmed," as de Goncourt tells us, "by the grandeur of the King, bringing to her husband nothing but obedience, to marriage only duty; trembling and faltering in her queenly rôle like some escaped nun lost in Versailles."
Goncourt was a refined aristocrat who associated with the most highly civilised men and women of his day, and possessed the rarest secrets of aesthetic beauty. Indeed we may say that it is precisely the consciousness of coarseness which leads to a cowardly flight from the brave expression of life. Most of these excuses are impotent.
Shelley, Gautier, Zola, Flaubert, Goncourt! how I have loved you all; and now I could not, would not, read you again. How womanly, how capricious; but even a capricious woman is constant, if not faithful to her amant de coeur. And so with me; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that still may thrill me with the old passion, with the first ecstacy it is Balzac.
Then Fortini gasped and coughed slightly. The rigidity of his pose slackened. The hilt and hand against my breast wavered, then the arm drooped to his side till the rapier point rested on the lawn. By this time Pasquini and de Goncourt had sprung to him and he was sinking into their arms. In faith, it was harder for me to withdraw the steel than to drive it in.
In that mirror the war is reflected day by day for sixteen months. It is a mirror of two eyes; they are clear, shrewd, perspicacious, and bold; they are the eyes of a Frenchman. The author, Henri Barbusse, dedicates his book: "To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouy and on Hill 119," during December, 1915. In Paris Le Feu was honoured with the Goncourt prize.
Perhaps there is more than a hint of ingratitude in Daudet's later disgust with the inherent limitations of the drama, a disgust more forcibly phrased by his friends, Zola and Goncourt and Flaubert, realists all of them, eager to capture the theater also and to rule it in their own way.
Charpentier was the publisher of Zola, Goncourt, Flaubert, and of the newer realists. He was a man of taste, who cultivated friendships with distinguished artists and writers. Some disappointment was experienced at the recent public sale of his collection in Paris. The clou of the sale was undoubtedly the portrait of his wife and two children.
Rome is considered by those who make such matters their business a peculiarly favorable spot for proselytizing: there is supposed to be an afflatus from various sources which disposes the unbelieving soul to the reception of the Church's teaching. The MM. de Goncourt understand this: "What a vast embrace, what an immense holy contagion, is religion at Rome!"
Shortly afterwards Edmond de Goncourt published La Fille Elisa, the first notable novel of the kind by a distinguished author. It was written with much reticence, and was not indeed a work of high artistic value, but it boldly faced a great social problem and clearly set forth the evils of the common attitude towards prostitution.
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