[Lalou was a prominent French essayist and critic and the author of a comprehensive history of modern French literature entitled La litterature francaise contemporaine (Contemporary French Literature, 1922; revised editions 1924, 1941). In the following excerpt from that work, he provides a brief assessment of Mirbeau's major fiction and dramas.]

There are few writers as tiresome and as diverting as Octave Mirbeau—tiresome to read, but so diverting on reflection! Mirbeau's work accomplishes as a matter of fact, the miracle of clothing with the most outworn Romantic ornaments a naturalistic philosophy the meditations of which invariably end in platitude. Beginning with Sfbasden Roch, dedicated to Edmond de Goncourt, he extolled "the sublime beauty of the ugly." Le Jardin dès supplices, inspired by this thought, that "Love and Death are identical," pretends to imitate, in a garden borrowed from the Paradon, the art of the Chinese executioner who "extracts from the...