First published in serialized installments in L'Écho de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Dans le ciel, assembled and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, first appeared its present form in 1989.

A series of interlocking narratives, the novel begins by relating the creative failures of the self-styled novelist Georges, who produces nothing but an unfinished autobiography, then chronicles the poignant struggles of the painter Lucien, whose inability to complete his masterpiece culminates with his suicide when he severs his own hand.

The existential struggle of the artist, like Lucien, whose labor is foreordained to come to nothing, suggests that the creator maintains his dignity through a refusal to surrender and that he attains nobility in the rejection of compromise and the determination to persevere.

The son of a butcher, Lucien had had the good fortune to emerge « sound in mind and body from the stupefying regimen of secondary school », and thereafter, against the wishes of his father, had elected to become a painter – in the same way that l’Abbé Jules, from the novel of the same name, had chosen to become a priest, « By God!

» Thus, in the course of his development as a character – having forgotten his original convictions and lost himself in the aesthetic of the Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites, whom Octave Mirbeau had earlier skewered in his Combats esthétiques – Lucien ends by committing suicide after cutting off his “guilty” hand.