Germinie Lacerteux

Germinie Lacerteux

By Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt.

Translated by John Chestershire.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Preface to First Edition
4. Second Preface
5. Germinie Lacerteux
   1. I
   2. II
   3. III
   4. IV
   5. V
   6. VI
   7. VII
   8. VIII
   9. IX
   10. X
   11. XI
   12. XII
   13. XIII
   14. XIV
   15. XV
   16. XVI
   17. XVII
   18. XVIII
   19. XIX
   20. XX
   21. XXI
   22. XXII
   23. XXIII
   24. XXIV
   25. XXV
   26. XXVI
   27. XXVII
   28. XXVIII
   29. XXIX
   30. XXX
   31. XXXI
   32. XXXII
   33. XXXIII
   34. XXXIV
   35. XXXV
   36. XXXVI
   37. XXXVII
   38. XXXVIII
   39. XXXIX
   40. XL
   41. XLI
   42. XLII
   43. XLIII
   44. XLIV
   45. XLV
   46. XLVI
   47. XLVII
   48. XLVIII
   49. XLIX
   50. L
   51. LI
   52. LII
   53. LIII
   54. LIV
   55. LV
   56. LVI
   57. LVII
   58. LVIII
   59. LIX
   60. LX
   61. LXI
   62. LXII
   63. LXIII
   64. LXIV
   65. LXV
   66. LXVI
   67. LXVII
   68. LXVIII
   69. LXIX
   70. LXX
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Preface to First Edition

We must ask pardon of the public for offering it this book, and give it due warning of what it will find therein.

The public loves fictitious novels! this is a true novel.

It loves books which make a pretence of introducing their readers to fashionable society: this book deals with the life of the street.

It loves little indecent books, memoirs of courtesans, alcove confessions, erotic obscenity, the scandal tucked away in pictures in a bookseller’s shop window: that which is contained in the following pages is rigidly clean and pure. Do not expect the photograph of Pleasure décolletée: the following study is the clinic of Love.

Again, the public loves to read pleasant, soothing stories, adventures that end happily, imaginative works that disturb neither its digestion nor its peace of mind: this book furnishes entertainment of a melancholy, violent sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure the health of the public.

Why then have we written it? For no other purpose than to annoy the public and offend its tastes?

By no means.

Living as we do in the nineteenth century, in an age of universal suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we asked ourselves the question whether what are called “the lower classes” had no rights in the novel; if that world beneath a world, the common people, must needs remain subject to the literary interdict, and helpless against the contempt of authors who have hitherto said no word to imply that the common people possess a heart and soul. 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. We were curious to know if that conventional symbol of a forgotten literature, of a vanished society, Tragedy, is definitely dead; if, in a country where castes no longer exist and aristocracy has no legal status, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would appeal to public interest, emotion, compassion, as forcibly as the miseries of the great and the rich; if, in a word, the tears that are shed in low life have the same power to cause tears to flow as the tears shed in high life.

These thoughts led us to venture upon the humble tale, Sœur Philomène, in 1861; they lead us to put forth Germinie Lacerteux today.

Now, let the book be spoken slightingly of; it matters little. At this day, when the sphere of the Novel is broadening and expanding, when it is beginning to be the serious, impassioned, living form of literary study and social investigation, when it is becoming, by virtue of analysis and psychological research, the true History of contemporary morals, when the novel has taken its place among the necessary elements of knowledge, it may properly demand its liberty and freedom of speech. And to encourage it in the search for Art and Truth, to authorize it to disclose misery and suffering which it is not well for the fortunate people of Paris to forget, and to show to people of fashion what the Sisters of Charity have the courage to see for themselves, what the queens of old compelled their children to touch with their eyes in the hospitals: the visible, palpitating human suffering that teaches charity; to confirm the novel in the practice of that religion which the last century called by the vast and far-reaching name, Humanity:⁠—it needs no other warrant than the consciousness that that is its right.

Paris, October, 1864.

Second Preface

Prepared for a posthumous edition of