Goncourt Journal

Edmond himself admitted that because the journal entries were "hastily set down on paper and not always re-read, our syntax is sometimes happy-go-lucky and not all our words have passports",[5] and they particularly delighted in accurately recording the slanginess and vulgarity of ordinary speech.

When that story drew to its close Edmond initially decided to abandon the Journal, but he took it up again in time to give a detailed description of life during the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris, and the Commune.

[8] The many accounts of conversations in the Journal were aided by Edmond's excellent memory, and, according to Flaubert, by Jules' habit of jotting notes on his shirt-cuff on the spot.

[9] Ludovic Halévy, who was present at many of these conversations, gave the brothers credit for extreme accuracy, and similarly the narrator of Proust's Le Temps retrouvé thought that Edmond de Goncourt "knew how to listen, just as he knew how to see"; but some among the Goncourts' contemporaries claimed that the brothers either consciously or unconsciously distorted the conversations they recorded.

[12][13] The critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve regularly appeared in the Journal, as did the painter Edgar Degas and the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

[10][14] Appearances are also made by Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas père and fils, Stéphane Mallarmé, Georg Brandes, Ivan Turgenev and Oscar Wilde.

[15][16] Not surprisingly, the often backbiting tone of the Journal led to strained relations with Edmond's surviving friends when they came to read his treatment of them in the published volumes.

The seventh volume called forth hostile articles in the Journal des débats and the Courrier français, while Le Figaro reported that a Funeral Committee was being set up on Edmond's behalf.

The Atlantic Monthly thought that in fifty years time it would be "the most fascinating and vivid history in existence of the literary and artistic life of Paris during the last half of [the 19th] century", but that its portrait of the close partnership of the Goncourts themselves was of still greater interest.

[28] In more recent years Jacques Noiray called it "a modern Comédie humaine of the republic of letters",[29] while according to another literary scholar, David Baguley, the Journal is "an immense machine for transforming lived experience into documentary form", to be used as raw material by the Goncourts when writing their novels.

[3] The critic Adam Kirsch attributes the modern age's interest in late-19th century French literary life to the Goncourt Journal.

[35] In 1935-1936 the Académie did produce an "édition définitive", albeit a selective one, in nine volumes,[36][29] and in 1945 they announced that a complete edition would appear the following year.