Madame Gervaisais Reading Order

Madame Gervaisais (1869) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is their most ambitious novel and, in their own view, the fullest realization of their documentary method — the study of a cultured, agnostic Parisian widow who travels to Rome for her son's health and is gradually, imperceptibly, and totally absorbed into Catholicism until she becomes a kind of mystic, sacrificing her son's needs to her religious vocation and dying in a state of religious exaltation. The novel is remarkable in the Goncourt oeuvre for its dual subject: Rome as a city (the palaces, churches, paintings, and social world of the mid-nineteenth-century Papal city) and Madame Gervaisais as a consciousness (the slow transformation of a rational, cultivated mind by a force it initially analyzes but is eventually unable to resist). The Rome of Madame Gervaisais is documented with the same research precision the Goncourts brought to every social world they studied; their journals from their Roman trip in 1856 are the source material, and the rendering of the city's visual and social world is among the best in French fiction. The novel was not a popular success but was admired by the writers who mattered: Flaubert recognized it as the Goncourts' masterpiece, and Zola described it as the source of his own method in the Rougon-Macquart series.