One of the most scandalous books of its era, the classic erotic novel "The Diary of a Chambermaid" was the inspiration for not one but two films— by Jean Renoir and by Luis Buñ uel. Penned by the infamous anarchist and art critic Octave Mirbeau, it is the shocking, titillating, and pungently satiric tale of Cé lestine R., the daughter of a fisherman, and her sensuous adventures and ultimate debasement in the depraved world of the French nobility. A masterwork of erotica, it has been compared to Fanny Hill and the Marquis de Sade's "Justine" in its unabashed depiction of human licentiousness— demonstrating, in Cé lestine's own words, how ""when one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.""
