Les Mémoires de mon ami

A story by French writer Octave Mirbeau, Les Mémoires de mon ami was first published serially in Le Journal between November 27, 1898 and April 30, 1899, in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair.

It is apparent that the Dreyfus Affair had captured the exclusive attention of an author willing to give up production of a work whose value was purely remunerative.

[1] The narrator, Charles L., is an unremarkable cashier seemingly bereft of personality, a man condemned to live forever a larval existence.

However, once he is confronted with the crushing stupidity and overwhelmingly hideousness of his fellow-beings (beginning with those of his wife and in-laws), he withdraws into his own inner world, into the realm of the imagination and dream, which Mirbeau saw as so important, and which established the author's affinity with his contemporary, Sigmund Freud.

Alienated from others and from himself, Charles L. develops a capacity for pitiless observation, which allows him to detect all of society's absurd and ignominious features in their petrifying horror.