Best known for his controversial novels and plays, Octave Mirbeau remains to be rediscovered as a short-fiction writer and art critic. He championed the causes of unknown artists who were destined to become giants in their fields: first and foremost Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro. He also wrote in favor of the painters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Maurice Utrillo; the sculptors Camille Claudel and Aristide Maillol; and the musicians César Franck, Claude Debussy, and Richard Wagner. As a journalist he espoused their causes very early in his prolific career, during which he wrote more than a thousand articles between 1874 and 1917, sometimes under the pseudonyms of Daniel René, Henry Lys, and Jean Maure. The directors of the Gaulois and the Figaro, the France and the Journal eagerly displayed his name...