Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but always honest, Celestine is one of the great female characters in literature. Rhoda Koenig in The Sunday Times The Diary of a Chambermaid was written as a satire of Parisian society in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair.Mirbeau brings a journalist's analytical eye to Celestine's adventures as she loses her innocence and becomes as corrupt and depraved as the men who exploited her. Since its publication in 1900 it has never ceased to shock and fascinate its readers and has been made into a film by Jean Renoir in 1946 and Luis Bunuel in 1964.