Goncourt brothers

[5][3] The brothers' uncle, Pierre Antoine Victor Huot de Goncourt, was a deputy for the Vosges in the National Assembly between 1848 and 1851.

In 1852, the brothers were arrested, and ultimately acquitted, for an "outrage against public morality" after they quoted erotic Renaissance poetry in an article.

[12] From 1862, the brothers frequented the salon of the Princess Mathilde, where they mixed with fellow writers like Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, and Paul de Saint-Victor.

In November 1862, they began attending bi-monthly dinners at Magny's restaurant with a group of intellectuals, writers, journalists, and artists.

These included George Sand, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Ernest Renan, and Paul de Saint-Victor.

Seen through the nerves, in this conscious abandonment to the tricks of the eyesight, the world becomes a thing of broken patterns and conflicting colours, and uneasy movement.

To the Goncourts humanity is as pictorial a thing as the world it moves in; they do not search further than "the physical basis of life," and they find everything that can be known of that unknown force written visibly upon the sudden faces of little incidents, little expressive moments.