Le Journal d'une femme de chambre Reading Order

Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid, 1900) by Octave Mirbeau is one of the great satirical novels of the Belle Époque — a chambermaid named Célestine records her experiences with the bourgeois families she serves, and her observations are a devastating indictment of provincial and Parisian bourgeois life: the hypocrisies, the sexual predation, the casual cruelties, the racism, the anti-Semitism, the political reaction. Mirbeau was a political journalist and an anarchist sympathizer, and the novel is a polemic as much as it is a novel — but it is saved from polemic by Célestine herself, who is not a simple victim or a simple moralist. She is intelligent, calculating, sometimes cruel, often complicit in the systems she observes, and completely clear-eyed about her own compromises. The novel ends with her marrying Joseph, the reactionary, anti-Semitic coachman whom she knows to have murdered a child, because he represents security and she has lost any other hope. This ending was shocking and remains so: Mirbeau's social analysis is bleak enough to show that resistance to the bourgeois world is not available to those who depend on it for survival. The novel was filmed twice — by Jean Renoir in 1946 and by Luis Buñuel in 1964 — and both films are among the finest social satires ever made.