Fur and Feathers

The Goncourt Brothers
"Our minds see alike and see with the same eyes."

Here, photographed by Nadar, they appear to be dressed alike. Silently sharing their thoughts, leaning towards eachother, slightly touching. Both of them smoldering in a way that is romantic, and intimate. Jules is looking our way. They are fascinating, and repellent.

"Yes, it is true that there is an element of sickness in our talent, and a considerable element at that. But this, which at the moment causes displeasure and irritation, will one day be regarded as our charm and our strength. Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate."

In this paean to hypersensitive neurasthenia, were they describing themselves?
"Charles was impressionable to a supreme degree. He had an almost painfully sharp sensitivity to everything in life. Wherever he went he was affected by his reactions to the feeling of the place. He could discern a scene, an argument, in a house where smiles were on every face; he could sense what his mistress was thinking when she was absolutely silent, he could feel in the atmosphere the hostilities of his friends, he could sense good or bad news in the walk of the man coming towards him. And all these perceptions, which had something of presentiment about them, were so strong that they were almost unconscious. A look, the sound of a voice, a gesture would speak directly to him and reveal what they managed to hide from everyone else, so much so that he envied from the bottom of his heart those fortunate souls who go through life without seeing any more than they are meant to see and who maintain their illusions to the end.

Objects had a great effect on him, were as eloquent to him as people. They seemed to have a physiognomy, a voice, and that mysterious uniqueness that creates sympathy or antipathy. These invisible atoms awaked an echo in Charles. A piece of furniture would reveal itself as friend of foe. An ugly glass would put him off an excellent wine. The colour of a paper, the material covering a chair, would affect him both for the better and the worse, and his mood would change along with his impressions."

Then comes our sympathy - the death. The loathsomeness of the disease, the disease of a libertine. The details of it obsessively recounted. Once it has occurred, alone with his brother's body, Edmond peers through the door: "At midday, through the crack of the dining-room door, I saw the hats of four men in black." What could be more vivid, and pathetic? History then immediately overtakes the death - and Edmond survives for decades after, diminished.

In the Journals, the two batten on scurrilous gossip. And must say, I instinctively dislike all these coarse, vulgar men. Sitting at dinner with Flaubert, Dumas, and Zola, I too have an expression of melancholy surprise on my face, like Mme Daudet, "who seemed pained, upset, and at the same time disillusioned by the man's gross, intemperate unbuttoning of his nature."

In the journals, the women generally appear to be inhuman - and I align myself with those women, perhaps wistfully. "These women have horrifying heads, half antique cameo, half animal, sculpturally, implacably bestial in appearance."

Am also aligned in sympathy with all the young things in brothels, who they despise:
". . . . so many skinny graces, those spiteful, chlorotic little whores . . . always as melancholy and careworn as alms-collectors, with clouds of eviction on their foreheads, forever worried and, beneath the mask of laughter and caress, preoccupied with the parturition of their due; after all those shopworn chatterboxes, those mercenary parrots with their miserable, unhealthy slang picked up in the popular press, the brothel, and the workshop; after those touchy, peevish little things."

At one point Edmund encounters Judith Gautier. "In her fur and feathers, Theo's daughter looked beautiful, with a strange almost terrifying beauty. Her pale complexion barely tinged with pink, her mouth standing out like the mouth of a Primitive against the ivory of her broad teeth, her clearly defined and as it were drowsy features, her big eyes, whose animal lashes, stiff lashes like little black pins, did not soften their gaze with a veil of shadow, all have the lethargic creature the indefinable, mysterious air of a sphinx, of a flesh, a matter in which there were no modern nerves."