Biography
Octave Mirbeau was born on 16 February 1848 in Trévières, Normandy, and grew up in Rémalard, from where he was expelled from a Jesuit college at the age of fifteen. After a law degree he pursued reluctantly, he moved to Paris in 1872 and worked as a secretary and journalist for conservative papers before publishing novels such as Le Calvaire and Sébastien Roch under his own name from 1885 onward. A committed anarchist, he campaigned vigorously from 1897 for the wrongly convicted officer Alfred Dreyfus and even covered a fine imposed on Émile Zola. His greatest stage success came in 1903 with the comedy of manners Geschäft ist Geschäft (Les affaires sont les affaires); as an art critic he also championed painters such as Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin. Deeply disillusioned by the First World War, Mirbeau died in Paris on 16 February 1917, his 69th birthday.
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