La Mort de Balzac

Certainly, Mirbeau suggests, Balzac could be taxed with weakness, naiveté, and contradictory behavior, but his life was so vast, so tumultuous, and eventful that it could not be measured by the same common standards that were applied to other men's lives.

Nor could Balzac be judged by the same moral values or expected to conform to the same social etiquettes as others : « We are obliged to accept, love, and honor him as he was », Mirbeau writes.

A pessimist on the subject of love, which in his eyes, was nothing but a crude and destructive illusion, Octave Mirbeau analyzes the « double misunderstanding » on which the couple's « amatory exaltations » were based and which would ineluctably lead to the downfall of both.

In the third chapter – purporting to draw on the oral account given to him by painter Jean Gigoux in the studio of Auguste Rodin – the author fabricates a counterfeit narrative of Balzac's death agonies.

But Mirbeau was hardly concerned with respecting an inaccessible historic “truth”, since what mattered to him was to underscore the impossibility of communication between the two sexes who, in his view, were separated by an insurmountable abyss.