When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me all of his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, of the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with a serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate; and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain of the _brouillard Scandinave,_ in which it seemed to him that France was trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvais brouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to represent the only thing worth representing, _le vie vécue, la vraie vérité._ As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing, _l'optique:_ out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have all seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of expressing it. "There is a true thing I have said in my journal," he went on. "The thing is, to find a lorgnette" (and he put up his hands to his eyes, adjusting them carefully) "through which to see things. My brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it from us." How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing, literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in the invention of this that they have invented that "new language" of which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained. You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in _Charles Demailly:_ "I am a man for whom the visible world exists." Well, that is true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.