Octave Mirbeau: Le Journal d'une femme de chambre | The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900)

Octave Mirbeau's Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900) is perhaps well known not directly as a result of the author's book, but via Buñuel's 1964 cinematic adaptation of it, although the film is only loosely based on the book. Mirbeau's Le Journal d'une femme de chambre – a wonderful sprawling, digressive work of 400 pages – contains many memories of the maid writer Célestine, of a large number of other families she has worked for, and the details of their avarice, the sexual assaults she has undergone, the insults, the denials, the slavery, the fact that she has no one to complain to because – automatically, she is a powerless entity in a world where the rich always win. This isn't the place to argue about how much or how little the situation has changed today, but it's interesting to reflect that Célestine, as she realises, in a sense stands in a kind of mid-position between the rich and the poor because she has direct experience of both poverty and wealth.

Buñuel's film is more linear than Mirbeau's book, which might at first appear a little odd, but then both Buñuel and Mirbeau are anarchists. Nevertheless, we can very easily tweak out a general story from this book: Célestine, a maid, arrives at the house of the Lanlaire family, one which owes much of its wealth to ill-gotten gains, and she discovers a horrendous world. Her mistress dominates the family, especially her husband (who makes pathetically sexually frustrated overtures to Célestine), and only very reluctantly parts with any money. The place is engulfed in misery.

But the gardener Joseph, who has been with the family for fifteen years and is highly respected by his employer, will wield a very heavy influence on Célestine. An anti-Dréfusard, in other words an anti-Semite, Joseph is an odious individual who is not only cruel to animals but may well have raped a young girl and killed her. Célestine is well aware of this, as well as Joseph's theft of the Lanlaire silver, but all the same goes on to join Joseph in his thriving café in Cherbourg.

Mirbeau criticises religion, the bourgeoisie, the class system, the nature of work itself, politics in even its most narrow sense, and comes up with a hugely powerful weapon against general right-wing enslavement of the vast majority of the population. This book is a deadly political weapon.

Léon Werth: Père Lachaise Columbarium #3

Léon Werth (1878–1955) was a close friend of Octave Mirbeau, which probably says quite a lot. He was anti-bourgeois, anti-military, anti-clerical, libertarian, etc. In 1913 his novel La Maison Blanche (with a Preface by Mirbeau) got through to the third Goncourt selection but failed to win. Fifteen months in the trenches had convinced him of the folly of war, and the anger it caused in him was translated into Clavel Soldat (1919), which caused a scandal.

Saint-Exupéry was a great friend of Werth's after they met in 1931, and the aviator-writer dedicates Le Petit Prince to him, calling him the best friend he has in the world.

Passy Cemetery / Cimetière de Passy, 16th arrondissement, Passy, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #26

Octave Mirbeau (1848—1917) was an avant-garde writer, an influential journalist and an art critic whose views caused a great deal of disturbance to defenders of the status quo.

He was an atheist, pacifist, and anarchist who railed against a large number of institutions: the family, education, the Catholic Church, capitalism, the political system, etc.

Today Mirbeau is remembered most for his novel Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid) (1900), which Luis Buñuel very successfully filmed in 1964. This novel and two others — Le Jardin des supplices (Torture Garden) (1899) and Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique (A Neurotic's 21 Days) (1901) ­—attacked bourgeois 'respectability', and all caused something of a scandal.

Date of photo unknown.

Maurice Genevoix (1890—1980) is noted for his regional novels (Solange, and the Loire valley), his nature poetry, and his writings on World War I. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1925 with Raboliot.

The childhood of Marie Bashkirtseff (1858—84), who was born into the Ukrainian aristocracy, was nomadic and took her across Europe. She was a painter and sculptor who is noted for her Journal (1887), started at the age of fifteen, which was written in French.

Her grave is an artist's studio, and has been declared a historic monument. Around the door, many of her artistic works are engraved in the stone.

Bashkirtseff's name and the dates of her short life (she died at 25) framed by painting palettes.

Jean Giraudoux (1882—1944) was mainly a dramatist, noted for La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935) and Amphytryon 38 (1929).

Gabriel Marcel (1889—1973) was a Christian existentialist philosopher and playwright, amongst whose important philosophical works are Being and Having and The Mystery of Being (1951).

Dramatist and journalist Édouard Bourdet (1887—1945) was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and his first wife was the poet Catherine Pozzi. He became a major writer of boulevard plays in the interwar years. Fric-Frac (1936) was a big commercial success, and adapted into a cinematic version in 1939. Arletty called it one of Bourdet's great plays.