'And Now We Shall Never, Never See Her Again'

Ian Donaldson begins his 2011 biography of Ben Jonson not with the poet’s birth nor even his death but with his interment in Westminster Abbey. Though a popular playwright during his lifetime, Jonson died in poverty and was buried vertically in order to consume less valuable real estate. The upright position of the body was confirmed three times in the nineteenth century, when his grave was opened during neighboring interments. In the driest of tones, Donaldson devotes six pages to the less-than-dignified fate of Jonson’s carcass. None of which should suggest Jonson was a scorned or forgotten man. His biographer writes: 

“Ben Jonson, ‘the most famous, accurate, and learned poet of our age,’ died on 16 August 1637 [and was buried the following day]. . . . It was the height of summer, and many of Jonson’s friends and admirers would have left the metropolis, yet the crowd that assembled at his house in Westminster to accompany the body to the Abbey included ‘all or the greatest part of the nobility and gentry then in town.’ Jonson’s death  was evidently seen as a major public event: the passing of the dominant literary figure of the age. Shakespeare’s death in April 1616 had been quite a different affair . . .”

 

Another, humbler death was recorded 215 years later on the same date, August 16, in 1862: Rose Malingre, the housekeeper for Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (Pages from the Goncourt Journal, trans. Robert Baldick, 1962), died that day:

 

“The two of us stood there in the drawing-room with the thought which the news of somebody’s death always inspires: ‘We shall never see her again!’ – a mechanical thought which recurs again and again.”

 

The Goncourts are not the most sensitive of witnesses, especially when women are involved. But their reaction is touching and true to the experience of having a loved one die. Malingre had served the brothers since they were boys:  

 

"It was this woman, this admirable nurse, whose hands our dying mother put into ours. She had the keys to everything she decided and did everything for us. For as long as we could remember we had made the same old jokes about her ugliness and her ungainly body, and for twenty-five years she had given us a kiss every night. She shared everything with us, our sorrows and our joys. Hers was one of those devotions which one hopes will be there to close one’s eyes when death comes.”

 

Their grief as recounted in the journal sounds convincing: “And now we shall never, never see her again,” and so on for another page.

 

The Goncourts started keeping their journal in 1851 and usually wrote in the first-person plural. Jules died in 1870 of syphilis at the age of forty and Edmond continued writing it until his death in 1896. The brothers, who also wrote novels, plays and social history, knew Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Daudet, Degas, Rodin and Zola, among other Parisian luminaries, and they also knew the city’s brothels and society balls. Their journal is history as a higher, wittier, more observant form of gossip. They were neurotic. They were proto-bloggers, with temperaments nasty and generous, goatish and cerebral. Their prose is alternately rambling and aphoristic. Their appetite for life and everything else – including words -- was bottomless. The most moving portion of the journal is the watch kept by Edmond over his younger brother as he died slowly and agonizingly of his venereal disease.

 

There is a coda of sorts. In the entry dated five days after Malingre’s death, the brothers learn things (from Jules’ mistress, a midwife) about their housekeeper that “astonish” them. She had lost two babies by the dairywoman’s son – one stillborn, the other dead after six months – and had turned to alcohol and sex, enticing lovers with cash stolen from Edmond and Jules. The Goncourts had never noticed any of this. They write on August 21:

 

“Poor woman! We forgive her. Indeed, seeing something of what she must have suffered at the hands of those working-class pimps, we pity her. We are filled with a deep commiseration for her, but also with a great bitterness at this astounding revelation. . . . Suspicion of the entire female sex has entered into our minds for the rest of our lives: a horror of the duplicity of woman’s soul, of her prodigious gift, her consummate genius for mendacity.”