Edmond de Goncourt's Journal:
The brothers, Edmond (1822-96) and Jules de Goncourt (1830-70) had an unusually close relationship. Spending time together virtually every day, they began writing together and eventually published six novels. But they are best known for their journals, which combined often caustic gossip with observations about contemporary literature. In June 1870 the death of Jules devastated his older brother, who initially decided to end the journals with the last entry Jules had written in January of that year, but he decided to continue as a way of dealing with his grief. By August, however, references to the Franco-Prussian War began to find their way into his pages, and over the next year Edmond produced are some of the finest eye-witness reports of war and revolution that I have ever read. I strongly recommend someday reading the entire journal for this period. It has been excerpted and translated in Georges J. Becker, Paris under Siege, 1870-1871: From the Goncourt Journal (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1969). |
August 6 [2007]
From the Print Room in the Library I see people running down the Rue Vivienne. I start 
to run after them.
From top to bottom on the steps of the Bourse* I see only bare heads, with hats held in air, and from every mouth there comes a mighty Marseillaise**, whose deafening bursts drown out the hum from the Exchange floor. Never have I heard such enthusiasm. I walk among men pale with emotion, youngsters jumping up and down, women gesturing as though intoxicated. Capoul sings the Marseillaise from the top of an omnibus in the Place de la Bourse, and on the boulevard Marie Sasse sings it standing in her carriage, which is almost lifted up by the delirious crowd.
Edmond de Goncourt
But as for that telegram announcing the defeat of the Crown Prince of Prussia and the capture of 25,000 prisoners, that telegram which, they say, is posted inside the Exchange and which everyone claims he has read with his own eyes, that telegram which by a strange hallucination some people think they actually see, saying, 'See, there it is!' as they indicate a wall in the background on which there is nothing posted -- that telegram I am unable to find.
*The Bourse is the French stock market.
**The Marseillaise is today the French national anthem, but, as a song closely associated with the French Revolution of 1789, it had been forbidden during the Second Empire.
Sunday, August 7 [1870]
A terrifying silence. On the boulevard not a vehicle moving; in the villa not a shout expressing a child's joy' and over the horizon a Paris whose noises seems to have died.
August 21 [1870]
[Goncourt is watching Paris' largest park being turned into a military base for the defense of Paris.]
In the Bois de Boulogne.
To see these great trees fall under the axe, swaying like creatures wounded to death; where there had been a curtain of green, to see a field of sharp stakes shining while like a sinister harrow fills your heart with hatred for the Prussians, who are the cause of this murder of nature. . . .
On the boulevards you see men and women question passing faces with their eyes, turn their ears towards every mouth that speaks -- disturbed, anxious, frightened.
August 23 [1870]
At the Saint Lazare station I ran into a group of twenty Zouaves [a French military unit], the remnants of a battalion that fought under MacMahon. Nothing is so beautiful, nothing has so much style, nothing is more scupltural, so painterly, as these men broken in battle. They bear the imprint of a weariness in no way comparable to any other weariness; their uniforms are worn, faded, stained as if they had drunk the sun and rain for years on end.
George J. Becker, ed., Paris under Siege, 1870-1871: From the Goncourt Journal (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp.40-41, 44-45.