MIRBEAU (Octave) - Lot 163

MIRBEAU (Octave) Born in Trévières. 1848-1917. Writer, journalist and art critic. L.A.S. "Octave Mirbeau" to Maurice de Féraudy. S.l.n.d. 1/2 page in-8. Paper engraved with his address. Poignant letter from Mirbeau, faced with health problems: Before leaving for Contrexéville, O. Mirbeau would have liked to see his friend, but ... I didn't have the courage. I lead an awful, desperate life. I've had stomach catarrh for almost two months. You don't know what it's like... It's suicide, that's what it is! I still work, a little, sometimes in the morning. But I've lost my faith in work... Maurice de Féraudy, a member of the Comédie-Française, played Isidore Lechat, a cynical, unscrupulous character in Octave Mirbeau's Les affaires sont les affaires, a role he played over 2,000 times and in which he bid farewell to the Grande Maison. The play was a worldwide success. An influential and much-feared columnist and critic, Octave Mirbeau put his pen to fiction. His theatrical and novelistic universe is imbued with the same dark, uncompromising pessimism. Libertarian, anticlerical, antimilitarist, he was resolutely Dreyfusard. The last years of his life were desolate: marked by illness and despair at the sight of the terrifying butchery of the Great War.