Edmond and Jules de Goncourt; With Letters, and Leaves from Their Journals Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ...came back from Gavarni with Guys, the draughtsman of the Illustrated London News, a little man with an energetic face and grey moustache, who walks with a limp, and ceaselessly pulls up his sleeves with the flat of his hands over his bony arms; diffusive, full of parenthesis, zigzagging from one idea to another, going off the rails, losing, then finding himself again, arresting your attention with a slang metaphor, a word borrowed from the language of the German philosophers or a learned technical term of art or industry, and always holding you under the spell of such a pictorial form of speech that it makes things described seem concrete, visible. While walking he evoked a thousand memories, throwing in from time to time snatches of irony, sketches, landscapes, descriptions of towns riddled by bullets, men bleeding, disembowelled, and ambulances where the rats crawled about the wounded. "Then on the reverse side, as if in an album, or at the back of a drawing, one discovers a thought worthy of Balzac. This devil of a man gave us social silhouettes, glimpses of the French, and the English type, which were quite new and fresh, not having got mouldy in books; satires lasting two minutes, pamphlets compressed into a word, a treatise on the comparative philosophy of the national genius of races...." About this time the brothers made the close acquaintance of Charles Edmond the critic, and his wife. "Sunday, May 9.--We dined at Bellevue with the Charles Edmonds in a tiny cottage full of light and gaiety, a real little nest with a garden the size of a basket, and where there is only room for flowers.... " Apropos of and his book, some one happens to quote the words of Montrond, Talleyrand's wild friend, whom a priest asked on his deathbed...