Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“RENEE MAUPERIN” by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (written and first published 1864); and “GERMINIE LACERTEUX” by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (written 1864; first published 1865).
America has its Pulitzer Prizes, established in 1917. Britain has its Booker [or Man Booker] Prize, established in 1969. New Zealand has its Ockham Books Awards, amalgamating two different national book awards that were set up in the 1960s. But, well ahead of the Anglophone countries, France has had its Prix Goncourt since 1903; and established in the same year was a rival to the Prix Goncourt, namely the Prix Femina. In an age where there are now dozens of book awards worldwide, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Femina are still going strong.
I mention all this because, without the Prix Goncourt, the men who gave their name to it might well be forgotten. Think French novelists in the 19th century and you think Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo [if you can stand him], George Sand, de Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans and, in the field of pop novels, Sue, Dumas, Loti and Verne. But the de Goncourt brothers? Um… aren’t those the guys the prize is named after?
So a little introduction to them. Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896) and his younger brother Jules de Goncourt (1830-1868) were the sons of a high-ranking army officer with pretensions to aristocratic status. Their parents left them a legacy large enough to ensure that they didn’t have to work for a living and could devote their lives to research and writing. They were unique among literary siblings in that, despite their 8-years age difference, until Jules’ death, everything they wrote, they wrote in collaboration. Neither of them married though both took mistresses – in fact sometimes sharing the same mistress. Though progressive in some of their views – save for the antisemitism they shared with many of their contemporaries - they were obsessed with the 18th century and first made their name with books about 18th century art (Watteau, Fragonard etc.) and the morals and manners of Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary France. They were very sensitive about criticism of their work and were prone to getting into squabbles with critics and other writers who disagreed with them. Apparently in France, even now, their most-often-read work is their nine-volume diary, published by Edmond in the 1890s (Journal – Memoires de la vie litteraire). It gives interesting details about the literary life of France between 1851 and 1896, but it also chronicles all the de Goncourts’ quarrels, feuds and bitcheries with other authors.
Yet these brothers, with nostalgic tastes and pretensions to aristocratic status, were very advanced in their aesthetic when it came to their novels. Stendhal and Balzac, despite the melodrama in which both sometimes dabbled, were concerned with the psychology of their characters, although Balzac was moving in the direction of categorising social classes. Loosely speaking, they could be called Romantics. The de Goncourt brothers were seeking Realism, with a tendency to dwell on the lower classes of society. In a way, their Realism was a bridge between the Romanticism of Balzac and the deterministic Naturalism of Zola, which again had its tendencies to melodrama. Like Zola, the de Goncourt brothers were into “documenting” physical facts of life, carrying notebooks around with them, and jotting down things they saw and heard in the streets. Very progressive, and yet, withal, social snobs. [Which reminds me irresistibly of Modernist, but incredibly snobbish, Bloomsbury in the 1920s.]
Now why, you ask, Dear Reader, am I banging on about Edmond and Jules de Goncourt? This is all part of my bibliophilic neurosis in catching up with books that have sat unread on my shelves for years. I own copies of [English language translations of] two of the de Goncourts’ best-known novels, Renee Mauperin and Germinie Lacerteux, the latter often being cited as their most popular and most-often-read novel. So at last I got around to reading them and here are my comments thereupon.
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I have rarely read a novel as broken-backed and fragmented as Renee Mauperin. At first it seems to be shaping up as the light-hearted story of the eponymous Renee. When we meet her she is a vivacious and spirited young woman chafing at polite conventions. Is this going to be a novel about her winning her way through to greater freedom, like a proto-feminist? In her first of many arguments, she protests at the constraints laid upon young women thus:
“We must say ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘Yes’, and that’s all! We must always keep to monosyllables, as that is considered proper. You see how delightful our existence is. And for everything it is just the same. It we want to be very proper, we have to act like simpletons; and for my part I cannot do it. Then we are supposed to stop and prattle to persons of our own sex. And if we go off and leave them and are seen talking to men instead – oh well, I’ve had lectures enough from mama about that! Reading is another thing that is not at all proper. Until two years ago I was not allowed to read the serials in the newspaper, and now I have to skip the crimes in the news of the day, as they are not quite proper.” (Chapter 1)
Renee’s parents are nouveaux riches middle-class people who have made their way up from the lower orders, own a mansion outside Paris, and are eager to make profitable marriages for both 20-year-old Renee and their older son, the lawyer Henri. Snobbery and the desire for status are rampant. But Renee is adept at turning away suitors with her cheerful and flippant witticisms. M. and Mme. Mauperin discuss their ambitions for their unmarried children in a familiar setting:
“M. and Mme. Mauperin were in their bedroom. The clock had just struck midnight , gravely and slowly, as though to emphasise the solemnity of the confidential and conjugal moment which is both the tete-a-tete of wedded life and the secret council of the household – the moment of transformation and magic which is both bourgeois and diabolic…” (Chapter 5)
So far, the novel is almost like something out of Jane Austen. Mme. Mauperin is concerned and upset and in a tizz about how they will get Renee married, while M. Mauperin – who is much loved by Renee – is more relaxed and unworried. This is more-or-less the same as the roles of Mr and Mrs Bennet when they worry over the marital prospects of their daughters, especially witty Elizabeth Bennet.
At which point the de Goncourts’ novel begins to fall apart. Not only are the authors addicted to writing in very short chapters, but they insist on also having longer chapters that rather gracelessly give us full back-stories of any new characters that we meet in the novel. It is a sorry case of tell-not-show. Thus Chapter 2 gives us the whole back-story of M. Mauperin and how he earned his money; Chapter 6 is a self-contained description of a smooth society priest the Abbe Blampoix; Chapter 8 is a character study of Renee’s lawyer brother Henri, his opportunism and ability to switch his political views depending on the company he is in; Chapter 20 gives us the story of Mme. Bourjot, who plans to marry her daughter off to Henri; and Chapter 35 tells us the whole history of a very minor character, who appears very late in the novel, M. de Villacourt, a ci-devant aristo who has come down in the world and is determined not to let his family name be bought by an haut-bourgeois. It was common for the wealthier middle-classes to pay to have their family names changed to aristocratic titles.
Read as separable essays, there is much to be said for these back-stories. Indeed the self-contained description of a self-satisfied society priest is slyly very funny:
“The Abbe Blampoix had neither benefice nor parish. He had a large connection and a specialty: he was the priest of society people, of the fashionable world and of the aristocracy. He confessed the frequenters of drawing-rooms, he was the spiritual director of well-born consciences, and he comforted those souls that were worth the trouble of comforting. He brought Jesus Christ within reach of the wealthy. ‘Everyone has his work to do in the vineyard’, he often used to say, appearing to groan and bend beneath the burden of saving the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the Chausee-d’Antin… He was tolerant and intelligent, could comprehend things and could smile. He measured faith out according to the temperament of the people and only gave it in small doses. He made the penances light, he loosened the bonds of the cross and sprinkled the way of salvation with sand. From the hard, unlovely, stern religion of the poor he had evolved a pleasant religion for the rich. It was easy, charming, elastic, adapting itself to things and to people, to the ways and manners of society, to its customs and habits, and even to its prejudices. Of the idea of God he had made something quite comfortable and elegant.” (Chapter 6)
There is also much historical interest in the presentation of Henri Mauperin: “Henri Mauperin was a young Doctrinaire. He had belonged to that generation of children whom nothing astonishes and nothing amuses; who go, without the slightest excitement, to see anything to which they are taken and who come back again perfectly unmoved.” (Chapter 8)
The de Goncourts are clearly implying here that real idealism had been squeezed out of young French arrivistes by the battering of recent history. By 1864, when the novel was written, France had already gone through a revolution and a radical republic, the dictatorship of Napoleon, the restoration of a reactionary monarchy, the second revolution of 1830 and the 18 years of the bourgeois monarch Louis Philippe, another brief radical republic, and then Louis Bonaparte’s coup which made him the Emperor Napoleon III. After all these changes, what could young people believe of governments and parliaments? Better, like Henri, to just look out for your own advancement. Blasé cynicism is the order of the day.
One could say that the novel is held together by the authors’ satirical critique of bourgeois manners, gossip, shallow morality and pursuit of status. Occasionally an older man called Desnoisel, sometime companion of Renee, spars verbally with complacent businessmen who complain about the ungrateful lower classes. Says Desnoisel naughtily in one such encounter: “…you see we have had a revolution against the nobility; we shall have another one against wealth. Great names have been abolished by the guillotine and great fortunes will be done away with next.” (Chapter 31)
Yet for all this, the novel still does not hold together. Renee is lost in these stand-alone episodes and explanatory chapters about other people, and she does not develop credibly as a real character. After a major family tragedy ( I will not go into the details), she sinks into deep depression, sickens and eventually dies. In the midst of this process, we are told:
“Gradually the ways, tastes, inclinations, and ideas – all the signs of her sex, in fact – made their appearance to her. Her mind seemed to undergo the same transformation. She gave up her impetuous way of criticising and her daring speech. Occasionally she would use one of her old expressions, and then she would say, smiling, ‘That is a bit of the old Renee come back’. She remembered speeches she had made, bold things she had done, and her familiar manner with young men; she would no longer dare to act and speak as in those old days.” (Chapter 56)
The stuffing has been knocked out of her and she has advanced to nowhere.
I have the awful impression that the de Goncourts hastily devised the final death scenes and sorrow to wrap up a novel which had got out of control.
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Written in 1864 and published in 1865, Germinie Lacerteux plunges us into the world of the poor and abused, far from the world of Renee Mauperin. It is essentially the story of the progressive degradation and eventual destruction of a poor woman.
A country girl from a poor peasant family, Germinie Lacerteux comes to Paris aged 14. She has been physically abused as a child, and in Paris she is abused by her first employer: “Cursed, scolded and bullied by the proprietor, who was used to abusing his maids and who was annoyed with her for being neither old enough nor ripe enough for a mistress…” (Chapter 3) Shortly after which, while others are out of the house “Joseph was busy sorting dirty linen in a small dark room. He told Germinie to come and help him. She went in, screamed, fell down, wept, begged, struggled, called desperately… The empty house remained deaf.” (Chapter 3) She is raped. The result is a still birth some months later.
Soon things look up for her. She becomes the personal maid to snobbish, haute bourgeoise, but essentially kindly Mlle. de Varandeuil. In a cruel world, young Germinie for a short time finds consolation in religion, but more than anything she craves for real love and affection. We are told that this is made difficult because she is unattractive with “broad, sturdy, emphatic cheekbones, freely sown with small-pox marks” and “an almost simian character to the lower part of her head, where a big mouth with white teeth and full, flat, crushed-looking lips smiled in a strange and vaguely irritating grin.” (Chapter 5). When she is not at work about the house, she makes friends with a silly gossipy woman Mme. Jupillon. She looks after Mme. Jupillon’s adolescent son “Bibi” Jupillon. In due course she becomes fixated on “Bibi”, follows him, wants his affection. Finally – now aged about 30 - she becomes pregnant to him… and her baby daughter is delivered in a foul hospital, described in detail by the de Goncourts, where she just avoids contracting puerperal fever. “Bibi” accepts the child but the baby girl becomes sick and dies.
“Bibi” deserts Germinie.
Germinie, when not tending to her employer’s needs, takes to drink in a big way… then “Bibi” returns to her as he has a complex plan to exploit her for her money. So desperate is Germinie for human affection that she falls for him again, becomes pregnant again, is deserted again, drinks herself silly again when her employer is away, and has a miscarriage. And in all this her employer is completely unaware of her life outside her home. As the de Goncourts remark: “It was a miracle that this disordered and agonizing existence, this shameful broken existence did not break out. Germinie let nothing of it appear, she let nothing of it rise to her lips, she let nothing of it be seen in her face, nothing appear in her manner, and the curse-ridden base of her life remained still hidden from her mistress…. She led two lives. She was like two women, and by dint of energy, feminine diplomacy, with a coolness that was always present even in the muddiness of drink, she managed to keep those two lives separate, and remain in Mademoiselle de Varandeuil’s presence the honest, sober girl she had been, emerge from her orgy without carrying the trace of it and exhibit when she had just left her lover a modesty like that of an old maid disgusted by the goings-on of other servants.” (Chapter 36)
By the time she definitively separates from “Bibi”, her hunger for love, for human warmth, has become psychopathic, indeed nymphomaniacal. This woman who has already endured rape, a miscarriage, the loss of a baby and a still birth now basically wants sex – rough sex if possible – to at least let her believe she is both alive and connecting with someone. “At every moment there rose from her whole being the fixations of desire, to fill her with that mad, unending torment, that migration of the senses to the brain; obsession – an obsession which nothing can drive away, for it always comes back, a lewd violent obsession swarming with images, an obsession which brings love in contact with all a woman’s senses, brings it into her closed eyes, rolls it round her head, hawks it hot around her arteries.” (Chapter 48)
She falls in for a while with a slick libertine and roue Victor Gautruche. Their sexual activity is presented with a masochistic explicitness that would never have appeared in a contemporaneous novel in Victorian England. With Gautruche “ between these two human beings there would be terrible, desperate, deadly love-making, savage ardours and indulgences, raging orgies, caresses full of the brutality and fury of wine, kisses that seemed searching for the blood under the skin like the tongue of a wild beast, annihilations which engulfed them and left them nothing but the corpse of their bodies.” (Chapter 52)
Gautruche, solely for his own comfort, wants to make their relationship permanent. Germinie, already betrayed and abused by men, turns him down and walks out on him, saying that the only person who has ever really cared for her is her employer, Mlle. de Varandeuil, who still has not the faintest idea that her valued servant lives a different life in her own time from the life she lives at her domestic work. Germinie now hits rock bottom. Desperate for rough sex, she solicits any available man on the streets, not asking for pay. Finally, worn out by drink, anguish and (presumably) rough and random sex, she contracts pleurisy and dies. She is buried in an unmarked paupers’ ditch in the Montmartre cemetery.
Her story has covered many years from adolescence to early middle age.
After Germinie’s death, Mlle. de Varandeuil discovers for the first time that Germinie has stolen from her, was in debt, and has led an orgiastic life. At first Mlle. de Varandeuil curses Germinie for her deceitfulness. But then her mood softens and she visits Germinie’s grave.
The novel ends with a truly noble, third-person oration, about the fate of the poor – possibly the best thing in the novel.
Remember, this consistently bleak and in many ways depressing novel is widely regarded as the de Goncourts’ best, and certainly most popular, novel. Why? I can only assume that its frankness about sex, its consistent sympathy for the abused Germinie, and its very simple, chronicle-like plot have made it widely readable. The book is on the side of the wretched of the earth. Also, its fame was boosted by Edmond de Goncourt’s turning it into a stage play, which performed well, and Zola later called it the novel that spurred him onto his own literary career. Some have suggested that it gave Zola the idea for his Nana.
But there are problems. As was apparently the case in most of their novels, including Renee Mauperin, the de Goncourt brothers structure Germinie Lacerteux as a series of very short chapters, sometimes no longer than a page or two. We are in effect seeing a series of vignettes. This is very good when the collaborative authors are producing convincing physical descriptions of the seedier quarters of Paris; but it also means there is not the continuity of thought or psychological development of character that could be found in longer episodes. The life of Germinie is seen in snapshots.
Worse, and again as in Renee Mauperin, the de Goncourts have the awful tendency to tell rather than show. In long paragraphs of analysis, they explain Germinie’s states of mind rather than dramatising them.
There is an apparent awkwardness to the novel’s opening, which is an uncharacteristically long introduction to Mlle. de Varandeuil, how she only just survived the revolution and how she gradually became an “old maid” up to 1830s when Germinie became her servant. All very interesting historically, but hardly relevant in relation to the novel’s main character Germinie. Only at the very end of the novel do we see what the de Goncourts are up to. The novel’s conclusion brings us back to Mlle. de Varandeuil and her feelings about Germinie. In effect, the authors have made Mlle. de Varandeuil their neat bookends. But that opening is still very inept.
An obvious problem for readers is the credulity of Mlle. de Varandeuil. How is it possible that, over many years, the employer, constantly in contact with her maid, could not have had the slightest inkling that Germinie was leading a double life? The answer textbooks give us is that the story is based on fact. Germinie was based on the de Goncourt brothers’ own maid, Rose Malingre, who stole from them and whose wild life they knew nothing about until she died. And Mlle. de Varandeuil was based on an aunt of theirs. Alas, while this is true, it still plays unconvincingly in the novel. It might be based on the truth, but it lacks verisimilitude. Sometimes raw truth does not work in fiction.
And the very worst characteristic of the novel Germinie Lacerteux? As later the novels of Zola sometimes did, the de Goncourts really turn their main character into a “type” or a “case” – an example of the oppressed and mistreated working class, degraded by abuse. Does Germinie never think beyond her desperate desire for affection which turns toxic? Is there nothing more to her mind than what the authors neatly explain for us? It would appear not. She is a cipher, constricted by the limits the de Goncourts have imposed upon her.
And now, dear brother, let us turn our microscope upon another specimen…
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The de Goncourt brothers wrote a total of six novels. But on the basis of two of their best-known novels, what is a fair assessment of their work? In 2006, a rather tart article in the British Guardian dismissed their novels as “unreadable and forgotten” and went on to say that only their gossipy journal is worth reading. This is too harsh. Despite the messy structure of Renee Mauperin and despite the superficial characterization of Germinie Lacerteux, both novels show sharp flashes of wit, certainly give us a vivid view of both middle-class and proletarian class in mid-19th-century France, and carry the stamp of authenticity in their descriptiveness. Perhaps this means that they are mainly of historical interest. But they are still readable.
Photograph taken in the 1860s by the famous pioneer photographer Nadar of the actress Gabrielle Rejane in the role of Germinie Lacerteux.