About the work
Geschäft ist Geschäft (Les affaires sont les affaires) is a three-act comedy of manners by Octave Mirbeau. After a long struggle to get it staged, it premiered on 20 April 1903 at the Comédie-Française in Paris, where it became an immediate triumph.
Plot
The ruthless businessman Isidore Lechat has built a fortune of fifty million francs through relentless speculation and wants to marry his daughter Germaine into the aristocracy, while bankrolling his son Xavier's extravagant lifestyle and gambling debts. Xavier's death in a car accident and Germaine's elopement with her penniless lover, Lucien Garraud, wreck his plans and wound him more deeply than any financial loss.
Cultural significance
With Lechat, Mirbeau created a character embodying the venal morality of the Third Republic, in which, according to the play, politics, the press and the courts all bow to money. Following its Paris success the play was soon staged in Germany and Russia, where Leo Tolstoy explicitly defended its controversial ending; a 1994-95 Paris revival ran for some 400 performances.