A Life in Paris – March 16, 1862

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

We went to the avenue Champs-Élysées, near the Arc de Triomphe, to see the objects to be sold at auction by Anna Deslions, the tart who for so long lived across the court from us and who, from the fourth story of our house launched herself into this wealth, this luxury, this reverberating, scandalous existence. After all, these women do not offend me: they constitute a break with the monotony of life, its formalism, its social rigour. They lend a little madness to the world, slap the banknote in the face, represent caprice released, free, naked and victorious in a world of solicitors with their cautious and economical pleasures.

Everything in Deslion’s house is of a gross and impure luxury and of a low species of impurity. Her drawing room in white and gold; her bedroom is in pink satin with gilt in every direction; and there is a dressing room with basins and water pitchers in yellow Bohemian crystal glass, all of it enormous, gigantic, wanting the biceps of Hercules to pick it up.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

Notes:
• From The Goncourt Journals 1851-1870
• Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, brothers, were French writers.

A Life in Paris – March 3, 1862

A very light snowfall. We took a cab to Théophile Gautier’s, 32, rue de Longchamps, at Neuilly, to let him see the published fascicles of our book on eighteenth-century art…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

A very light snowfall. We took a cab to Théophile Gautier’s, 32, rue de Longchamps, at Neuilly, to let him see the published fascicles of our book on eighteenth-century art.

He lives in a street of shabby, rustic houses built round courtyards filled with poultry, and fruit shops with little black feather dusters hanging before their doors; such a suburban street as Hervier depicts with his artistically grimy brush. We knocked on the door of a plastered house and found ourselves in the home of the sultan of the epithet. A sitting room with furniture in red damask and heavy, Venetian like, gilt woodwork; old pictures of the Italian school with lovely spots of yellow flesh; over the fireplace a mirror lacking quicksilver and bordered with coloured arabesques and Persian characters like something in a Turkish café; the kind of indigent and hit-and-miss sumptuousness in which you would expect to find an old retired actress who had got the pictures as the result of the bankruptcy of an Italian manager.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

Notes:
• From The Goncourt Journals 1851-1870
• Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, brothers, were French writers.

A Life in Paris – January 12, 1860

We are in our dining room, that pretty box lined, enclosed and canopied in tapestry…

Photography print available at Found View Gallery.

We are in our dining room, that pretty box lined, enclosed and canopied in tapestry, against which have hung Moreau the elder’s triumphant “Revue du Roi,” lighted up and enlivened by the soft glow of a bohemian glass sconce.

At our table sit Flaubert, Saint-Victor, Aurélien Scholl, Charles Edmond, Julie, and Mme Doche, whose slightly powdered hair is gathered attractively into a red net. […] At dessert Mme Doche went off to a dress rehearsal […], and Saint-Victor […] went along with her and Scholl.

The rest stayed and talked about the theatre, Flaubert making fun of it rather rudely, as is his wont. “The theatre is not an art,” he said, “it is a secret [….] This is the secret. First, you have a few glasses of absinthe at the Café du Cirque. Then you say of whatever play is being discussed: ‘It’s not bad, but it wants cutting.’ Or you say: ‘Not bad, but there’s no play there.’ […]

The conversation passed on to this person and that among those in our circle, with a great deal about how hard it is to find people one can get along with, people who are not vicious, nor unbearable, nor middle class, nor ill bred. […]

We were left alone with Flaubert in the sitting room all foggy with cigar smoke, he striding back and forth across the carpet, knocking his bald head against the pendant of the chandelier, pouring out words, overflowing, delivering himself up to us as to his brothers in the spirit. He talked to us once again of his retired existence, solitary even in Paris, shut in and barred against the world. His only recreation is this Sunday dinner at Mme Sabatier’s, La Présidente, as Théophile Gautier and his friends call her.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

Notes:
• From The Goncourt Journals 1851-1870
• Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, brothers, were French writers.