Octave Mirbeau’s moving 1896 tribute to Edmond de Goncourt following his sudden death. A personal memoir exploring Goncourt’s revolutionary impact on French literature, his controversial Journal, and his dedication to artistic integrity.
Edmond de Goncourt’s death came so suddenly, it’s left me so utterly shattered, so deeply stricken, that I honestly can’t summon the calm state of mind needed to assess a life as significant as his, or to speak properly of his illustrious and revered work. I could try all I like to gather my thoughts, pull together dates, characteristic details, reread passages from his books, rifle through bundles of his letters—I simply couldn’t do it. The grief would quickly drag me back from an effort I know is beyond my nerves today, back to this numbing, crushing realisation: “Can he really be dead?”
When Alphonse Daudet’s fatal telegram reached me Thursday morning, I refused to believe it. I read it over and over before the idea could penetrate, so violently did it offend my reason. It seemed like something that should never happen. The thing is, I still had before my eyes and in my heart the fresh vision of a robust Goncourt, alert, full of health, full of vigour, full of plans—such touching plans! It’s exactly a fortnight ago, this morning, that he came to spend the day at mine with Robert de Montesquiou, whose exquisitely subtle wit and ingeniously, spontaneously elegant conversation he greatly enjoyed. That day, Edmond de Goncourt was expansively cheerful, with a liveliness not always typical of him. He enchanted us with that incredible youthful spirit he kept intact beneath his white hair, despite all the daily battles and betrayals life had brought him, all the bitter disappointments and keenly felt injustices. Never, I think, had I felt so reassured about his vitality as I did that day. He was one of those who banish the image of death to the realm of miracles.
Since Thursday, I have been wandering about the house, wandering about the garden, trying to recover everything he said to us in the very spots where he said it. I stop before the flowers where he stopped. And I see again the joy in his eyes, the joy in his hands—those quick, supple hands that touched flowers with such respectful, caressing grace, with the same tactile pleasure they showed when he would draw from his display cases, to show us, some fragile and incomparable trinket. And I hear too his voice, still so near, saying: “Come now, Mirbeau, when will you give me some of those Japanese irises?” We had agreed I would go and plant them in his Auteuil garden come autumn. The prospect delighted him. And I still have these words ringing in my ears: “With those irises you’ll plant, the peonies Hayashi will send me from Japan this winter, and if Antoine puts on La Faustin, I’ll be happy for quite some time.” Alas! Now he is happy forever!
Forgive me for mixing these disjointed, trembling notes with such personal memories. But they haunt me. And I loved him, admired him above all others and—though he wasn’t one to be lavish with demonstrations of friendship—I know too that he loved me. When someone you have truly loved and who loved you disappears forever, a great discouragement takes hold, and you can only stammer little things, like a child.
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But we must tell ourselves that Edmond de Goncourt isn’t disappearing—rather, he is entering that higher life where he becomes more present to us, more cherished still. If his mortal image vanishes into the mystery of the invisible, we see the enlarged image of his spirit shining more luminously in our memory, becoming imperishable and glorious there. All its unique beauties, its noble examples, are engraved in deep strokes that will never fade. Posterity begins for him. It comes, calm and certain, without the whole retinue of blind comradeships and obliging interests, to lay the golden palm of eternal life upon his coffin and to unite once more, in our sorrowful pity, the souls of the two brothers momentarily separated, now reunited forever in death’s lasting survival.
Edmond de Goncourt had one exclusive, heroic, violent passion: literature. He sacrificed everything to it, like a priest to his faith. He feared women for the constraints they might bring to a writer’s independence, to an artist’s free spiritual expansions. If he made his hearth empty and barren of that grace and consolation, it was to make his work more sincere, to preserve it from the petty compromises to which a wife’s influence or a mistress’s whim almost always subjects you. He knowingly preferred certain solitude and the desiccating sorrows it brings, especially in old age, to the possibility of even a momentary eclipse of his professional virtues. Not that he was what you would call a misogynist—he took infinite pleasure in women’s company and knew how to be charming there—but he wouldn’t sacrifice to any pleasure, however keen, what he considered his duty, however painful it might sometimes be. So you would search in vain, I believe, through our literature for a work more truly sincere than his, more absolutely free of concessions to the public’s changing taste or fashion’s capricious demands, more firmly asserting a character of struggle and revolt against routine’s stagnations and the heavy inertia of ready-made ideas.
I repeat, I have neither the time nor the freedom of mind needed to study, even synthetically, this extraordinary work that contains so many essential things—that contains all things, I might say, since it ranges from novel to history, from art essay to theatre, from the highest philosophy to the indiscreet gossip of memoir; it restores the past with what magic of movement, what tumult of rediscovered life, and translates the modern. Nothing that constitutes a society’s organism, nothing that was an epoch’s intellectual curiosity remains foreign to it. Edmond de Goncourt takes passionate interest in everything, he sees everything, feels everything—things that even after Stendhal and Balzac we hadn’t thought to see and feel—and he has, to express them, a singularly vivid and multiple style that renders—almost physically—the colour, the design, the smell, the tremor, the reflection.
In everything he attempted, everything he achieved—in the novel with Germinie Lacerteux, Manette Salomon, Madame Gervaisais; in theatre with Henriette Maréchal and La Patrie en danger; in history with his Tableaux de la société sous le Directoire; in art with his monographs on eighteenth-century artists and his so curious, so patient research on Japanese artists—he showed himself each time an initiator, a precursor. We can say of Goncourt that we owe him the introduction into French literature of new sensibilities and, consequently, new forms of pity. His name has been an important date that will remain celebrated in letters. As Émile Zola said, he truly is the master, our master. From him springs, victoriously and definitively, the liberation of the book.
⁂
Now I would like to say a word about a delicate question close to my heart. In recent years, Edmond de Goncourt was much attacked because of his Journal, even by some of his intimates who had always admired him until then. I won’t rehearse the objections raised on this score. It seems some were justified—I’m not talking about the invectives, naturally—which weren’t lacking either, and through which people hoped to tarnish and diminish a reputation it’s in no one’s power to tarnish or diminish. Certainly, we would all have preferred the great writer to have stopped his publication some years ago. But since he decided otherwise, we must accept this Journal as part of his work. And for my part, I accept it without scruple, and I have come to see it as its necessary and moving complement. Victor Hugo said one had to accept everything from Shakespeare, like a brute. I admire everything of Goncourt’s like a brute.
And after all, isn’t this Goncourt Journal a curious book, always—often poignant, like a friend’s confession, disillusioning too, like a veil torn from unexpected intimacies—revealed too soon perhaps—but finally, such as it is, in its disconnectedness, in its irreverent undress of life mixed with fiction, an impressive book where you feel vibrating in every line the soul of the noble and great artist who lived it and wrote it. There are plenty of nerves in this book, plenty of exacerbated sensibilities; there’s also the perpetual throbbing of a wound that never stopped bleeding, a wound caused by the public’s long indifference to the prodigy of his talent. There’s also, piercing through the proud contempt, an irritated aspiration, almost morbid, for success—sincerely confessed, in any case, which makes it touching. There’s all that, granted!
And what is this little shadow-spot before the dazzlement of this work? What’s this passing weakness worth in the impeccable unity of this character where we all have only noble and beautiful examples to draw from? And if it is a weakness, after all, we must love it, cherish it even more than a virtue, for nothing moves us in a great man like these little weaknesses that make him more human, closer to us, more fraternal.
⁂
Oh dear and great Edmond de Goncourt, I will go, when autumn comes, to plant the irises you loved—not in your garden, alas! as we had decided, but around your tomb. And if flowers speak, they will tell you of my faithful mourning and my devotion to you, and how much, in this painful and exhausting business of letters, your friendship was the purest joy and the highest pride of my life.
1896.
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Léon Hennique Novel 