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 “true,” and there is a considerable gray area between his explicit works of fiction, and articles that represent themselves falsely as reportage. None of his other impostures of that ­ambiguous kind, however, are quite as brazen or as seductively ­persuasive in their deception as the triptych making up The Death of Balzac, which, seen purely as a literary exercise, is a masterpiece of sorts, in terms of the persuasiveness of its mendacious execution and the elegance of its narration. It is a gripping and affectively powerful story, artful in its very atrocity; a prime specimen of the work of an exceptional writer.