The blow was a hard one, but the brothers were not thus to be silenced, nor by the subsequent failure of other dramatic ventures and an effort to found a newspaper. They had been little more than imitators. They now entered the field they soon made their own. The writers of their day were for the most part classicists; a few before Victor Hugo were romanticists. The De Goncourts stood for the modern, what they could see and touch. In this way they became realists. What their own senses could not apprehend they at once rejected; all they saw they deemed worthy to be reproduced. They lived in a period of reconstruction after the devastation of the revolution. The refinement and elegance of the society of the later Bourbon monarchy, still within view, they yearned for and sought to restore. A series of monographs dealing with the art and the stage of these days, which appeared in 1851-2, won for them the first real recognition they enjoyed. These were followed by various critical essays on the same subjects, contributed to newspapers and periodicals, and a novel, 'La Lorette,' which had a large sale and marked the beginning of their success from a financial point of view. "This makes us realize," they wrote in their Journal, "that one can actually sell a book."[Pg 6551] Their reputation as men of letters was established by the publication in 1854-5 of 'Histoire de la Société Pendant la Revolution' and the same 'Pendant le Directoire' the aim of which, they said, was "to paint in vivid, simple colors the France of 1789 to 1800." This object they accomplished, so far as it concerned the society of which they themselves were descendants; but the reactionary spirit in them was too strong for an impartial view of the struggle, and their lack of true philosophic spirit and broad human sympathy led them to make a picture that, interesting as it is, is sadly distorted. Their vivid colors are lavished mainly on the outrages of the rioters and the sufferings of the aristocrats. But for wealth of detail, the result of tireless research, the history is of value as a record of the manners and customs of the fashionable set of the period. Of the same sort were their other semi-historical works: 'Portraits Intimes du XVIIIième Siècle,' separate sketches of about a hundred more or less well-known figures of the age; 'L'Histoire de Marie Antoinette,' and 'La Femme au XVIIIième Siècle,' in which the gossip and anecdote of former generations are told again almost as graphically as are those which the authors relate of their own circle in their memoirs. Their most important contribution to literature was their 'L'Art au XVIIIième Siècle,' monographs gathered and published in seventeen volumes, and representing a dozen years' labor. This was indeed a labor of love, and it was not in vain; for it was these appreciative studies more than anything else that turned public attention to the almost forgotten delicacy of the school of painters headed