Charles Demailly Reading Order

Charles Demailly (1860) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt — originally published as Les Hommes de lettres in 1860 and revised under its protagonist's name in 1868 — is the Goncourts' novel of the literary milieu and their most directly autobiographical work: the story of the novelist Charles Demailly, who achieves literary success, marries an actress who publishes his private letters and destroys his reputation, and is destroyed by the experience into madness. The novel is the founding work of the French roman à clef about literary life — the first sustained fictional account of the Paris literary world of the 1850s (the newspapers, the small magazines, the café literary circles, the academic ambitions and rivalries) that Balzac had begun in Illusions perdues and that Zola would continue in L'Œuvre. The Goncourts' method is already fully formed in Charles Demailly: the precise documentation of a social world through the accumulation of observed detail, the clinical analysis of a psychological deterioration, the bitterness about the literary marketplace that marked their entire career. The analysis of the actress Marthe who destroys her husband by publishing his letters is partly a fictional processing of the Goncourts' own hostility toward women in literary life, and partly a genuine study of the mechanisms of celebrity destruction.