The Sceptical Mode

Abstract

Baudelaire and Sainte-Beuve, meeting by not improbable chance on the steps of a brothel, decide to seek alternative entertainment in conversation, and wander off in protracted discussion of the immortality of the soul. Jules de Goncourt, while having his teeth polished, finds himself a captive if willing listener to a dentist’s monologue on God, Christ and the Church. These anecdotes come from that inexhaustible source of information on the intellectual preoccupations of men of letters in nineteenth-century France, the diaries of the Goncourt brothers.¹ They are merely two of many such stories related by Jules and Edmond suggesting the extraordinary durability, for an age of scientific fervour, of religion as talking-point and focus of debate. ‘Dîner chez Uchard,’ note the brothers, and add: ‘Grande conversation sur Ia religion’ (II, 201). The hosts and the venues change, the topic is invariable. Haubert’s Sunday gatherings feature ‘des causeries qui sautent de sommet en sommet, montent aux origines du paganisme, aux sources des dieux, fouillent les religions’ (V, 108). In a report of an evening with the artist Gavarni, only two interrelated subjects of conversation are recorded: religion, miracles (II, 150). At the celebrrted dinners at Magny’s restaurant, where all the above mentioned celebrities were wont to carouse with Taine, Renan, Turgenev and others, only sex rivalled religion for frequency and intensity of treatment.