year), _Manette Salomon_
(1867), and _Madame Gervaisais_ (1869).

[Sidenote: Their work.]

It is desirable to add that, besides the work already mentioned and
published before 1870, the two had given a book called _Idees et
Sensations_, setting forth their literary psychology; and that, after
the cataclysm, Edmond published a description of their house and its
collections, his brother's letters, and an immense _Journal des
Goncourt_ in some half-score of volumes, which was, naturally enough,
one of the most read books of its time. Naturally, for it appealed to
all sorts of tastes, reputable and disreputable, literary-artistic and
Philistine, with pairs enough of antithetic or complementary epithets
enough to fill this page. Here you could read about Sainte-Beuve and
Gautier, about Taine and Renan, about Tourguenieff and Flaubert, as well
as about Daudet and Zola, and a score of other more or less interesting
people. Here you could read how Edmond as a boy made irruptions into a
newly-married cousin's bedroom, and about the interesting sight he saw
there; how an English virtuoso had his books bound in human skin; how
people dined during the siege of Paris, and a million other things; the
whole being saturated, larded, or whatever word of the kind be
preferred, with observations on the taste, intellect, and general
greatness of the MM. de Goncourt, and on the lamentable inferiority of
other people, etc., etc. If it could be purged of its bad blood, the
book would really deserve to rank, for substance, with Pepys' diary or
with Walpole's letters.[460] As it is, when it has become a little
forgotten, the quarterly reviewers, or their representatives, of the
twenty-first century will be able to make endless _rechauffes_ of it.
And though not titularly or directly of our subject, it belongs thereto,
because it shows the process of accumulation or incubation, and the
temper of the accumulators and incubators in regard to the subjects of
the novels themselves.

[Sidenote: The novels.]

To analyse all these novels, or even one of them, at length, would be a
process as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable. The "chronicles of
wasted _grime_" may be left to themselves, not out of any mere finical
or fastidious superiority, but simply because their own postulates and
axioms make such analysis (if the word unfairness can be used in such a
connection) unfair to them. For they claimed--and the justice, if not
the value, of the