On one occasion, when Edmond de Goncourt was openly rude to her at her Château Saint-Gratien, she, with her guests, sat stupefied. Later he apologized, tears in his eyes--he was a gallant, handsome gentleman--and he relates most ingenuously, "Suddenly she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek, saying, 'Of course I forgive you--you know how truly attached I am to you; I also, of late, have felt quite nervous and upset.'" It was this passage that caused Henry James to shiver; not because of the fact, but the lack of tact. The De Goncourts were taken up by the Princess in 1862. Jules, the younger brother, died in 1870, literally killed by his devotion to literary art. The chiselling of the De Goncourt phrases was deadly to brain and body. It is little wonder that their novels, one after the other, until Germinie Lacerteux appeared, should have been indifferently received. As Alphonse Daudet, ever receptive and tender in his judgments of original work, wrote: "Novels such as had never been seen before; novels that were neither moulded upon Balzac nor diluted from George Sand, but novels made up of pictures,... with plot scarcely indicated, and great blanks between the chapters; real break-neck ditches for the bourgeois reader. To this add an entirely new style, full of surprises--a style from which all conventionality is banished, and which, by a studied originality of phrase and image, forbids any commonplace in the thought; and then the bewildering boldness, the perpetual uncoupling of words accustomed to march together like oxen dragging a plough, the earnest care in selection, the horror of saying all and anything; considering this, how can one be astonished that the De Goncourts were not immediately greeted by the applause of the common herd?" The mystery of it is, Why should the De Goncourts have cared for the applause of that same bourgeois public they so despised, reviled, and held up to mockery in their books? Gautier, Zola, Daudet, had to work like galley slaves for a living; the two brothers and Flaubert were rich, as riches go with literary men; why, then, did they care whether they were popular or not? Was it because they were human, notwithstanding their theories of impassibility, perfection, and art for art's sake? The Château Saint-Gratien was the Princess Mathilde's country home until her death. There she entertained, as entertained George Sand at Nohant, all her friends. Until his death, in 1896, Edmond de Goncourt was her privileged visitor. The work of the two brothers in eighteenth-century chronicles amused and interested her, especially their minute histories of such actresses as Du Barry, Sophie Arnold; and, earlier, great women like Mme. de Pompadour, the Duchess of Châteauroux; great painters, Watteau, Boucher, Latour, Greuze, Lancret, Fragonard; and stage favourites such as Mesdames Saint Huberty, Clairon, and La Guimard.