Le Jardin des supplices

Description

Le Jardin des supplices, the most scandalous book of Octave Mirbeau, sets a savage satire of fin-de-siècle European politics and colonialism against a nightmare journey through a Chinese torture garden, where an Englishwoman, Clara, leads the narrator among flowers and executions. Dedicated to « the priests, the soldiers, the judges », it was written in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair and became a cult text of the Decadent movement. This is the Bibliothèque-Charpentier edition issued by Eugène Fasquelle in Paris in 1899, the year of first publication. This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1899 edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.