Calvary

Despite a troubled youth and harrowing experiences in the Franco-Prussian war, Jean Mintié is on the rise in Paris. He mingles in artistic circles and has modest success with his first writings. That all changes when he meets socialite Julie Roux. Feeling both intrigued and unsettled by her extravagance and outspokenness, he can't shake her from his thoughts. Their ensuing affair, initially captivating, takes a sharp turn as other aspects of Julie's personality come to the fore. Calvary, also commonly referred to by its French title Le Calvaire, is a tale of ruin, obsession and redemption. It marked Octave Mirbeau's debut under his own name, after he anonymously penned no less than ten works for others. He didn't have to look far for inspiration: the novel's portrayal of Jean and Julie's relationship parallels Mirbeau's own disastrous love affair with the notorious Judith Vinmer. He would later revisit this exercise in "writing as trauma therapy" in his third book Sebastien Roch, a novel about sexual abuse at a Jesuit school for boys. A raw and unflinching portrait of obsession in fin-de-siècle Paris, Calvary traces one man's descent into infatuation and the long road back toward redemption. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)