In every generation, one city emerges as the capital of the republic of letters. This is not necessarily the place where the best writing is being done: Masterpieces are just as likely to come from Jane Austen’s Hampshire parsonage as from Dr. Johnson’s London coffeehouse. It is, rather, a symbolic homeland of the imagination, a metropolis that sets the terms of critical judgment and literary debate. Such capitals are inevitably temporary, passing away as history and chance assemble other geniuses in other places. But long after they disappear, they retain a peculiar power to seduce the imagination. How many readers have wished they could talk with Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, or go to Greenwich Village parties with Hart Crane and Edmund Wilson?

Of all the cities that have served as literature’s capital, none is more famous or infamous than the Paris of the Second Empire; and no writers deserve more credit for its legend than the Goncourt brothers. Edmond de Goncourt, born in 1822, and his younger brother Jules, born in 1830, formed a partnership that is possibly unique in literary history. Not only did they write all their books together, they did not spend more than a day apart in their adult lives, until they were finally parted by Jules’s death in 1870.

The Goncourts wrote prolifically in every genre, but they never had the kind of success they so desperately wanted. They were less admired than Flaubert, though they shared his devotion to style, and less popular than Zola, though they pioneered the techniques of naturalism. Their plays flopped, while Alexandre Dumas got rich from “La Dame aux Camélias.” Their works on history and art were overlooked, as Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan became intellectual demigods. By the time he reached his 60s, Edmond was frantic to do something, anything, to secure his reputation: “My constant preoccupation,” he wrote, “is to save the name of Goncourt from oblivion in the future by every sort of survival: survival through works of literature, survival through foundations, survival through the application of my monogram to all the objets d’art which have belonged to my brother and myself.”

As it turned out, however, it was none of these things that rescued the Goncourts from “oblivion.” It was, rather, their Journals — the scandalous, vain, vengeful, brutally honest diaries in which the two brothers, and then Edmond alone, wrote the secret history of their age. Starting in 1851, the year their first novel was published, and ending just twelve days before Edmond’s death in 1896, the Goncourt Journals helped to immortalize their period as well as their authors. If we are still fascinated by the literary life of Paris in the late 19th century — not just the books but the personalities, the rivalries and friendships, the piquant combination of idealism and brutishness — we have the Goncourts to thank.

Both the idealism and the brutishness are on full display in “Pages from the Goncourt Journals” (New York Review Books, 434 pages, $16.95), a one-volume selection edited by the late scholar and translator Robert Baldick. This edition, which first appeared in 1962,is the latest of many delightful books brought back into print by New York Review Books, whose imprimatur has become a reliable guarantee of reading pleasure. In this case, the pleasure is decidedly of the guilty variety.

The Goncourts belonged to a world where poets mingled with princesses, politicians, and prostitutes, and they faithfully reported gossip from all levels of society, the more lurid the better. Indeed, the most representative sentence in the Journals may be the one that begins the entry for September 25, 1886: “This morning in the garden we talked about copulation.” It was a subject that never got boring. A friend of a friend had a mistress who claimed to have slept with Kaiser Wilhelm II: “She had orders to wait for him naked, stark naked except for a pair of long black gloves coming up above her elbows; he came to her similarly naked, with his arms tied together … and after looking at her for a moment, hurled himself upon her, throwing her onto the floor and taking his pleasure with her in a bestial frenzy.”

Swinburne, the English poet, would entertain visitors with “a collection of obscene photographs … all life-size and all of male subjects.” Zola had a second family that he hid from his wife; Turgenev lost his virginity to one of his serfs at the age of 12. Robert de Montesquiou, the aesthete who was the original of Proust’s Charlus, had his first love affair “with a female ventriloquist who, while Montesquiou was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client.”

Many of these stories seem to fall into the category of “too good to check.” But they provide a sense of what conversation must have been like at the famous “diners de Magny,” named after the Paris restaurant where the Goncourts, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and other writers gathered. It was the world’s most illustrious locker-room, where lechery was ennobled by worldweary romanticism: “Debauchery,” the Goncourts wrote in 1861,”is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.”

But the Goncourts’ Paris was also an intellectual boxing ring, where no one was ever allowed to forget his place in the standings: whose book had sold best, who had gotten a bad review, whose play was booed on opening night. “Coming away from a violent discussion at Magny’s,” the Goncourts write (using the first person singular, as always),”my heart pounding in my breast, my throat and tongue parched, I feel convinced that every political argument boils down to this: ‘I am better than you are,’ every literary argument to this: ‘I have more taste than you,’ every argument about art to this: ‘I have better eyes than you,’ every argument about music to this: ‘I have a finer ear than you.'”

The Goncourts, to their unending frustration, usually wound up at the bottom of the totem pole. They never had the success they thought they deserved, and over the years they became less and less able to tolerate the successes of their friends. It is true that their career was dogged by exceptionally bad luck. The first entry in the journal was made on December 2, 1851, the day the brothers’ first novel was published — and also, it so happened, the day that Napoleon III overthrew the Republic and took power as Emperor. As a result, the novel was completely ignored — “a symphony of words and ideas in the midst of that scramble for office,” as the brothers ruefully put it.

The Goncourts’ next big chance came in 1865, when their groundbreakingly realistic play “Henriette Maréchal” was performed at the Théâtre Français. But once again politics interfered, as protesters drowned the opening-night performance in “a tempest of hisses,” angered by the playwrights’ friendship with the emperor’s cousin. Jules died without ever enjoying a great success, and Edmond spent the rest of his life seething at younger, more talented writers like Zola and Maupassant. The last third of the journal alternates between self-pity (“I am condemned to being attacked and repudiated until the day I die”) and jealous digs at friends: “Maupassant’s success with loose society women is an indication of their vulgarity,” Edmond writes in 1893, “for never have I seen a man of the world with such a red face, such common features, or such a peasant build.”

Many writers think things like this about their rivals, but few have dared to record them for posterity. The Goncourts’ very shamelessness, their refusal or inability to censor their discreditable thoughts, is what makes their journals so absorbing — as Edmond himself knew full well. In his last years, he began to publish the early volumes of the journals, to the fury of certain friends who found old embarrassments dredged up in print. But he refused to be intimidated: “Monsieur Renan calls me an ‘indiscreet individual,'”Edmond told an interviewer in 1890. “I accept the reproach and I am not ashamed of it… For ever since the world began, the only memoirs of any interest have been written by ‘indiscreet individuals.'” The measure of the Goncourts’ indiscretion is that their journals are still so interesting, more than a hundred years later.

akirsch@nysun.com