"I am responsible for maintaining rural roads as mayor, but as a poet, I like to see them neglected." French writer Jules Renard was well-known in the late nineteenth century. He was elected mayor of the tiny village of Citry-le-Mines in a remote area of northern Burgundy in 1904; he was not a Parisian but a devoted countryman. Although he appeared to be a badger and had the soul of a rural bourgeois, he had the ambition of a metropolitan and was able to manoeuvre in higher social circles because to his wife's wealth. The Journal is Renard's masterwork and the least easily categorizable work of the French fin de siecle. He also authored fiction, journalism, and drama with great success.