Abbe Jules

Published in 1888, Abbé Jules is the middle volume of Octave Mirbeau's semi-autobiographical trilogy. Its central figure is a priest wrestling with his desires across a lifetime. The story is told through the eyes of a young boy, who watches a cramped, respectable provincial France in which family, schooling and faith combine to shape adults haunted by suppressed longing, savage imaginings and forbidden appetites. The novel traces how innocence is worn away, and it binds pity and suffering so tightly together that the two cannot be separated.

Mirbeau writes with the unsparing detail of Naturalism, a manner that recalls Zola and Flaubert. Alongside these harsh, clinical scenes sit passages of lyrical intensity and sensual warmth, where his prose builds light and colour with the eye of an Impressionist painter, much as Monet and Van Gogh did on canvas. The book belongs to a trilogy that begins with Le Calvaire and ends with Sébastien Roch, though it reads well on its own.