Octave Mirbeau: Two Plays - Business Is Business & Charity

Octave Mirbeau was born in Trevieres, Normandy, on 16 February 1848. He had a quiet

childhood, which seemingly came to an abrupt end when he was sent to a Jesuit college at

Vannes in 1859. The next four years were a miserable experience for the young Mirbeau, and

the barbarity, tyranny and snobbery he encountered there ñ which seemed to him a microcosm

of French society ñ would never be far from his writing for the rest of his life. Mirbeau

registered to study law at university in 1866 but in 1868 would claim that the had been

eating nothing and smoking up to 180 pipes of opium a dayí (Levi, 1992, 437). When the

Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Mirbeau could finally abandon his studies completely

and join the army as a lieutenant. In December 1870 he was wounded, and in 1871 he was

accused of desertion (he was acquitted of this charge in 1872). Just as his life in the

Jesuit college had been traumatic, Mirbeauís experiences in the army made him develop

ëa passionate loathing for the absurdity of warí (Levi, 1992, 437). After the Franco-

Prussian War, Mirbeau became a journalist specializing in art criticism (he was a pioneering

advocate of Paul CÈzanne, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin and Vincent Van Gogh) and then theatre

reviewing. He established and edited his own satirical journal Les Grimaces in the 1880s.

Mirbeau was always a colourful figure and was involved in at least twelve duels in his life,

several on account of the provocative opinions expressed in his journalism. The life and

work of Mirbeau remain a remarkable reflection of an extraordinary time. Although primarily

a journalist, Mirbeau was a versatile writer producing some significant fiction, including

LíAbbÈ Jules (Father Jules 1888), and two vitriolic masterpieces of the erotic-grotesque,

satires of contemporary France which have never lost the power to shock or provoke

universally: Le Jardin des supplices/Torture Garden (1899) and Le Journal díune femme

de chambre/The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900). By no means a prolific playwright, Mirbeau

nonetheless wrote six one-act plays (published together as Farces et moralites (Farces

and Morality Plays in 1904) and three full-length plays ñ one of which, Les affaires sont

les affaires/Business Is Business (1903), enjoyed international acclaim and is the work

that made Mirbeau, as Pierre Michel (1999, 25) reveals, ëun millionaireí. In terms of his

politics, too, Mirbeau offers an astonishing reflection of a dynamic epoch, moving steadily

to the left through his career. Starting as a Bonapartist with anti-Semitic views, he

became, by turns, a monarchist and then a republican before becoming, most famously, an

anarchist. As an anarchist living through a fascinating and tumultuous epoch of French

history, Mirbeau strove to be as provocative and incendiary as he could through his writing.

Indeed, despite this radical shift in his political opinions, Mirbeau was always consistent

in presenting ñ in his fiction, plays and journalism ñ an acerbic critique of what he

perceived as the widespread hypocrisy and corruption in French society. Given his shift

in political opinions, it is not surprising that the one-time anti-Semite Mirbeau would,

like …mile Zola, be outspoken in his support of the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus

in the notorious and protracted Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s onwards. Mirbeau developed many

important artistic friends in his career, including Camille Pissarro, StÈphane MallarmÈ

and Anatole France.