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The principal interest of
Mirbeau's three completed chapters comes because they refocused the novelist on his own literary origins. Like Mirbeau, his protagonist-narrative, Charles Varnat, enters, as a personal secretary, into the service of a Normand country squire, the Marquis d'Amblezy-SĂ©rac, a
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man of vast political ambition. Mirbeau's story serves as a pretext for him to return to the years when he himself had been obliged to earn his daily bread by hiring his pen out to a succession of employers.
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These experiences had left
Mirbeau embittered by memories of his humiliation and frustration. Here again, as in the articles and stories dating from the 1880s, Mirbeau likens the lot of this intellectual
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Apparently, the undertaking that
Mirbeau envisaged soon appeared to him to be one that exceeded his capabilities, and also was one that would be at odds with his own evolving views on the
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on a great landowner. In 1900 he had entertained the idea of a book of epic dimensions – like
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in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, beginning at the time of the
Marshall
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It was in the mid-1890s that Octave
Mirbeau first began contemplating work on a
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135:(in French)
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382:Characters
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389:CĂ©lestine
339:La 628-E8
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374:(2006)
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394:Clara
280:Drama
261:Dingo
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312:Home
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