This hideously decadent fin de siecle novel has become an underground classic. There are satirical and allegorical dimensions, but it remains irreducibly horrible.' Phil Baker in The Sunday Times ' First published in 1898 this decadent classic flays civilised society down to its hypocritical bones and is le dernier cri in kinky exoticism.' Anne Billson in Time Out" ' The Torture Garden by Mirbeau: a quite stunning investigation into the furthest extremities of physical love. Almost post-modern in style and structure, it is a genuinely intelligent, and therefore deeply unsettling, work.' Philip Kane in The Independent on Sunday 'A century after its first publication, this book is still capable of shocking. The opening satire is probably meaningful only to scholars of French political history, but the subsequent journey into the Far East accentuates connections between love and death, sex and depravity, fastidiousness and pleasure. And the petty, parochial corruptions of the...

L'enfance de Jean-François Marie Mintié fut morose, auprès d'un père falot et d'une mère névrosée qui meurt prématurément. Plus tard, Paris le déçoit, ville malsaine où les femmes le dégoûtent. Il s'engage alors dans l'armée. Là, il découvre un monde de cruauté et de misère, et tue pour la première fois. De retour chez lui, il apprend la mort de son père. À Paris, Mintié, devenu écrivain, rencontre Juliette Roux dans l'atelier de son ami, le peintre Lirat, esprit fort et original. Pour celui-ci, Juliette est une femme entretenue, vicieuse et méprisable comme toutes les femmes. Mais le souvenir de Juliette hante Mintié : est-elle réellement dépravée? Et lui, que connaît-il de l'amour? Que fut sa vie, si ce n'est un échec?...La voix de Mirbeau est ici tout à fait particulière : réaliste, mais avec une ironie et un lyrisme douloureux, d'autant plus sincère qu'elle se rattache à l'autobiographie de l'auteur.

"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.