Un gentilhomme

In 1900 he had entertained the idea of a book of epic dimensions – like Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace – except set in France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, beginning at the time of the Marshall Mac-Mahon's "coup d'état" on May 16, 1877.

Whereas Mirbeau had been increasingly drawn to unconventional plot narratives, disorienting because of their equivocal meaning and lack of linear structure (see Torture Garden and Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique), his new project would require him to supply an abundance of explanatory background to contextualize the contemporary history his book was to treat, as if such historical reality was really accessible at all.

Like Mirbeau, his protagonist-narrative, Charles Varnat, enters, as a personal secretary, into the service of a Normand country squire, the Marquis d'Amblezy-Sérac, a 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.

Here again, as in the articles and stories dating from the 1880s, Mirbeau likens the lot of this intellectual proletariat to prostitution, and compares the life of a personal secretary to that of a servant, albeit an even more degraded one.