The Death of Balzac

Here, presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of Octave Mirbeau's darkest works: a fictionalized account of the death of the giant of French letters, ­Honoré de Balzac.

Among his journalistic endeavors, Mirbeau contributed a large number of short stories to the newspapers in the fin-de-siècle period, and he honed his skill in that kind of work to near-perfection. Many of his anecdotal short stories make the customary tokenistic pretences to be "tr...