Jules de Goncourt, who died prematurely, was the more artistic of the two brothers, the one who thought more creatively, as Edmond often pointed out. For a while, the two of them were part of the Bohemian set gravitating around Henry Murger, Aurélien Scholl and Nadar. In 1854, they suddenly broke with their old friends, and in 1860 they published a roman à clé that settled some old scores. The novel condemns the duplicity of the bohemian newspapers. The book’s original title was Les Hommes de lettres (Men of Letters), but that was eventually changed to Charles Demailly. Not only is Nadar’s Pantheon the subject of a long description, but Nadar himself is also the inspiration for the character Couturat, who is first a journalist then the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Scandale. It is less an attack on Nadar as he really was than an attempt to use him as a prototype for the insignificant, politically inclined, strong-willed and wily journalists of the era.