Long before People magazine, Page Six, and Gawker were the Goncourt brothers. Born into an aristocratic family, they knew everyone and saw everything in nineteenth-century Paris--and whether visiting ballrooms or brothels--they sublimely wrote about every last detail in their journals. As you can imagine, merciless gossip follows on Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rodin, and anyone in between.
The recent article by Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun faithfully described the Goncourts as belonging:
"to a world where poets mingled with princesses, politicians, and prostitutes, and they faithfully reported gossip from all levels of society, the more lurid the better. Indeed, the most representative sentence in the Journals may be the one that begins the entry for September 25, 1886: ' This morning in the garden we talked about copulation.'"
Republished this month by NYRB, the collected journals also represent a masterpiece of French literature written during the era.
When thinking about your reading choices for upcoming holiday travel, put down the US Magazine and instead pick up Pages From the Goncourt Journals. Not only will you shamelessly get your daily dose of gossip while simultaneously impressing your relatives, you'll never look at a Degas painting in the same way again.
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