Like Dickens, Théophile Gautier, Mérimée, and some other literary
celebrities, the brothers Goncourt tried their hands at drawing and
engraving before devoting themselves to letters. Sometimes in their
hours of leisure they further made essays in water-colour and pastel.
Thanks to Philippe Burty, Jules de Goncourt's "Etchings," collected in a
volume, and some of Edmond's sepia and washed drawings, allow us to
glean certain of the earliest of those records in which the faithful
Dioscuri endeavoured to portray each other with a care both affectionate
and touching. A very pretty "Portrait of Jules as a child, in the
costume of a Garde Française," a drawing heightened with pastel, is
described by Burty as one of Edmond's best works, but one,
unfortunately, which it was not possible to reproduce. "In the
swallow-tail coat of the French Guard," says Burty, "starting for a
fancy dress ball, the brilliance of his eyes heightened by the powder,
his hand on his sword-guard, at the age of ten, plump and spirited as
one of Fragonard's Cupids." Here we have the younger of the Goncourts,
delineated with all the subtlety of a delicate mannerism. Edmond was
eighteen at the time. Scarcely free of the ferule of his pedagogues, he
already looked at life with that air of keen astonishment which was
never to leave him, and which was to kindle in his eye the sort of
phosphorescent reflection that shone there to his last hour. It was the
elder and more observant of the two who first attempted to represent his
young brother, the one who was to be the greater artist of the pair, as
if the compact had already been entered upon, as if both by tacit
consent accepted the prolific life in common, then only at its dawn. A
great delight to the two brothers was their meeting with Gavarni, at the
offices of _L'Eclair_, a paper founded towards the end of 1851 by the
Comte de Villedeuil.
[Illustration: EDMOND DE GONCOURT.