Germinie Lacerteux Reading Order

Germinie Lacerteux (1865) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the founding documents of French naturalism — the first major French novel to insist that the poor and the working class deserved the same serious literary attention as the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and to apply to their lives the same detailed, documentary realism previously reserved for respectable society. The novel is based directly on the brothers' discovery, after the death of their longtime servant Rose Malingre, that she had led a secret life of financial ruin, alcoholism, and promiscuous relationships entirely unknown to them. They turned her story into a novel about Germinie Lacerteux, a servant whose concealed degradation destroys her quietly while she continues to perform her duties above stairs. The Goncourts' preface to the novel is one of the key statements of naturalist theory, arguing that the poor have as much right to a novel as the rich — an argument that influenced Zola and shaped French fiction for the next thirty years.