page_title: Contes cruels
section_title: Universal suffering
hierarchical_section_title: Contes cruels / Universal suffering
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Illustration anonyme d'un conte d'Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), paru dans "La Vie Populaire" le 12 mars 1891.
context_page_description: Contes cruels is a two-volume set of about 150 tales and short stories by the 19th-century French writer Octave Mirbeau, collected and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet and published in two volumes in 1990 by Librairie Séguier. The title was taken from Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, of whom Mirbeau was a friend and admirer.
context_section_description: Mirbeau privileged the themes of the tragic nature of the human condition, the « horror of being a man », suffering coextensive with human existence, and the sadism, homicidal impulses, and the « law of murder », on which society is founded. 
  In his short stories, Mirbeau also addresses the failure of communication between the sexes, the derisory, larval existence of people dehumanized by an oppressive and alienating society. Before Le Jardin des supplices , Mirbeau draws up an inventory of the evidence of human ignominy and universal suffering: « Man drags himself - Mirbeau writes - panting, from torture to agony, from the nothingness of life to the nothingness of death ».
caption: Octave Mirbeau, "Le Rebouteux", La Vie populaire, 12 March 1891
exif: {}