About This Book
Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) was a French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde. His work has been translated into thirty languages. After authoring ten ghostwritten novels, he made his own literary debut with Le Calvaire (Calvary, 1886), in which writing allowed him to overcome the traumatic effects of his devastating liaison with the ill-reputed Judith Vimmer, renamed Juliette Roux in the novel. In 1888, He published L’Abbé Jules (Abbé Jules), the first pre-Freudian novel written under the influence of Dostoyevsky to appear in French literature; the text featured two main interesting characters: l’abbé Jules and Father Pamphile. In Sébastien Roch (1890), Mirbeau purged the traumatic effects of his experience as a student during his sojourn among the Jesuits of Vannes. His other works include: Dans le Ciel (1893) (In the Sky), Le Jardin des Supplices (1899) (Torture Garden) and Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (1900) (A Chambermaid’s Diary).
