"I am no saint; I have known many men, and I know, by experience, all the madness, all the vileness, of which they are capable. But a man like Monsiuer?" –– from THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID The famous anarchist and art critic Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) inspired not one but two films (from Jean Renoir and Louis Bunuel) with his often forgotten classic THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID. Telling the scandalous story of Celestine R., a fisherman's daughter with a taste for men, Mirbeau reveals that "when one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay." The Naughty French Novel Series is comprised of great poets and writers of the past who, as the French are wont to do, tried their hand at erotic fiction and in turn created classics in the genre. Series editor John Baxter, the author of WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS, will contribute an introductory essay to each book, detaiing the lives of the authors, the social mores of the times, and the publication histories of each book.

Diary of a Chambermaid, The

Literature & Fiction

MIRBEAU, Octave

Erotica

HarpPeren

“[John Baxter is] a man with a great appreciation of what makes Paris tick.” — Newsday 
A “flip book” featuring two classic novels of sexual exploration, translated from French by John Baxter (Immoveable Feast, We’ll Always Have Paris): Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid and Alfred de Musset’s Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess, classic erotic tales of pleasure and excess.

The Diary of a Chambermaid/Gamiani

De Musset, Alfred

United States

Harper-perennial

A Chambermaid's Diary

History

Franklin Classics

The garden of tortures;

Tandem

Le journal d'une femme de chambre (French Edition)

LGBTQ+ Books

Adamant Media Corporation

Le Calvaire

Hippocrene Books

Mirbeau's text is complemented by Bonnard's drawings to describe people and places encountered on their journey across Europe

Bonnard: Sketches of a Journey : Travels in an Early Motorcar from Octave Mirbeau's Journal 'LA 628-E8'

Travel

Sotheby Parke Bernet Pubns

The Torture Garden

History & Criticism

Re-Search Pubns

Novel. "This hideously decadent fin-de-siecle novel by the French anarchist Mirbeau has become an underground classic... There are satirical and allegorical dimensions, but it remains irreducibly horrible"-The Sunday Times. First published in 1898, the decadent classic Oscar Wilde recommended as "revolting...a sort of grey adder" is available in a new edition from Dedalus, translated by Michael Richardson and with an introduction by Brian Stableford. The century that has passed since its first publication has done nothing to tame the book that, in Anne Billson's words, "flays civilised society down to its hypocritical bones and is le dernier cri in kinky eroticism."

Torture Garden (Re/Search Classics)

Literary

Often compared with Cleland's Fanny Hill and Sade's Justine and Juliette and dismissed by the more prurient critics as pornography, The Diary of a Chambermaid was written as a satire of Parisian society in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. Mirbeau brings a journalist's analytical eye to Celestine's adventures as she loses her innocence and becomes as corrupt and depraved as the men who exploited her. Since its publication in 1900 it has never ceased to shock and fascinate its readers and has been made into a film by Jean Renoir in 1946 and Luis Bunuel in 1964. It takes the essential message of Torture Garden a stage further by its greater realism.

The Diary of a Chambermaid (Decadence from Dedalus)

Genre Fiction

Dedalus Limited

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Books by MIRBEAU, Octave