21 days of a neurasthenic

the 21 days of a neurasthenic is a “Romance ” of the French writer Octave Mirbeau, published at Fasquelle in 1901.

A patchwork

Continuing its déconstruction of the romantic kind, Mirbeau has juxtaposed there about fifty cruel tales published in the press for fifteen years. Far from trying to camouflage the seams, it artificially binds the accounts by means of a tern narrator, Georges Vasseur, who makes a three weeks cure in a town of water of the the Pyrenees and which has two functions: on the one hand, to distribute the word randomly meetings, and, on the other hand, to project on the world its own depression, which transfigures it in a manner expressionnist before the letter. This refusal of a suspect composition of Finalisme testifies to the universal contingency.

A company in prey with the madness

With a ferocity jubilatoire, Mirbeau makes ravel under our eyes a whole series of imbeciles, maniacs and pirates, whose least is not the members of Gotha of the bar (main Of Buit), of the policy (Georges Leygues and Emile Olivier), or of the army (the general Archinard, for which the only means “of civilizing people, it is to kill them”), all indicated by their name for the construction of the readers. Because the nonsense of the situations evoked in these accounts, where the grotesque one disputes it with the horrible one, is the product of an aberrant company, even dying woman, where all goes to wrong way of justice and the good sense and whom the Mirbeau dispenser of justice dedicates to the execration by uncovering his ridiculous and its tares: misery, prostitution, the murder, the bureaucracy homicide, corruption, conformism mortifère…

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