Edmond de Goncourt

Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt (26 May 1822 – 16 July 1896) was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt.

Quotes

• Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
  • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt, 1855, translated from the French
    • Alternative source: Joris-Karl Huysmans. Against Nature. Penguin books.

• Baudelaire had supper at the table next to ours. He was without a cravat, his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean. The face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like a knife, and a precise elocution that tries to copy Saint-Just and succeeds.
  • Pages from the Goncourt Journals

• We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire.
  • Germinie Lacerteux

• She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others.
  • Germinie Lacerteux