Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Octave Mirbeau (February 16, 1848 in Trévières, Calvados - February 16, 1917) was a French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde. His work has been translated into thirty languages. Mirbeau spent his childhood in a village of the Normandy, Rémalard, pursuing secondary studies at a Jesuit college in Vannes, which expelled him at the age of fifteen. Two years after the traumatic experience of the 1870 war, he was tempted by a call from the Bonapartist leader Dugué de la Fauconnerie, who hired him as private secretary and introduced him to L''Ordre de Paris.