rs during their travels
were taken up with painting and drawing. Jules had attempted some
dramatic compositions while at college, and Edmond had been strongly
drawn to literature by the conversation of an aunt, of whom he saw much
before his mother's death. It was while engaged with their brushes in
1850 that it occurred to the brothers to take up writing as a regular
vocation; and thus was begun their remarkable literary partnership.

Their first essay was a drama. It was rejected; whereupon, nothing
daunted, they wrote a novel. It was entitled '18--,' and it is
interesting to observe that here, at the very outset of their career,
they seem to have had in mind the keynote of the chord on which they
ever afterwards played: the eighteenth century was the chief source of
their inspiration, and it was their life's endeavor to explore it and
reproduce it for their contemporaries with painstaking fidelity. The
novel engaged their serious and earnest attention, and when it was given
to the publisher they watched for its appearance with painful anxiety.
Unfortunately it was announced for the very day on which occurred the
_Coup d'Etat_. The book came out when Paris was in an uproar; and though
Jules Janin, one of the most influential critics of the day,
unexpectedly exploited it at great length in the Journal des Debats, its
circulation in that first edition was not more than sixty copies, most
of which were distributed gratuitously.

The blow was a hard one, but the brothers were not thus to be silenced,
nor by the subsequent failure of other dramatic ventures and an effort
to found a newspaper. They had been little more than imitators. They now
entered the field they soon made their own. The writers of their day
were for the most part classicists; a few before Victor Hugo were
romanticists. The De Goncourts stood for the modern, what they could see
and touch. In this way they became realists. What their own senses could
not apprehend they at once rejected; all they saw they deemed worthy to
be reproduced. They lived in a period of reconstruction after the
devastation of the revolution. The refinement and elegance of the
society of the later Bourbon monarchy, still within view, they yearned
for and sought to restore. A series of monographs dealing with the art
and the stage of these days, which appeared in 1851-2, won for them the
first real recognition they enjoyed. These were followed by various
critical essays on the same