Octave Mirbeau (1850–1917,) in full Octave-Henri-Marie Mirbeau, was a French journalist, art critic, and writer of novels and plays. He attracted attention by the violence of his writings.
Born in Trévières, Calvados, Mirbeau initially worked as a journalist for Bonapartist and Royalist newspapers. He became renowned as a storyteller with tales of the Norman peasantry in Lettres de ma chaumière (1886, ‘Letters from My Cottage.’) His autobiographical novels, Le Calvaire (1887, ‘The Calvary,’) L’Abbé Jules (1888,) and Sébastien Roch (1890,) derided the clergy and state of affairs of his time. He was one of the ten original members of the Académie Goncourt, founded in 1903.
Mirbeau’s most celebrated play, Les affaires sont les affaires (1903, ‘Business is Business,’) was adapted by dramatist Sidney Grundy (1905.) Mirbeau’s other works include Le Jardin des supplices (1898, Torture Garden, 1931) and Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900, A Chambermaid’s Diary, 1934.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Octave Mirbeau
The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden. Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.
—Octave Mirbeau
Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.
—Octave Mirbeau
Topics: Murder
To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.
—Octave Mirbeau
Topics: Business
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