Gerri Kimber - University of Reading

1
HIDDEN ASSASSIN : SUBVERTING THE BOURGEOIS IN
VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM’S CONTE CRUELS
Gerri Kimber
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, (1838-89), impoverished literary aristocrat, friend to
Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Wagner, is widely considered, alongside Maupassant, to be
the principle storyteller of his age. His tales, the Contes cruels, published in 1883,
follow the French tradition of the Fantastic, offering variants on the ghost story and the
supernatural escapade, charged with an ornate spiritualism, frequently icy in tone and
savage in their irony. Black humour is often used as a critical device; Villiers’
perception was that, as readers, we are naturally more receptive to a critic who makes
us laugh rather than one who attacks us. Baudelaire was of the same mind, ‘L’Être qui
voulut multiplier son image n’a point mis dans la bouche de l’homme les dents du lion,
mais l’homme mord avec le rire’. 1
Whilst Villiers concentrates on death as a recurrent theme, he shies away from
the sadism of Baudelaire or the necrophilia of Poe. The physical deaths that occur are
almost all absurd in nature, occasionally intertwined, in the more solemn, morbid
tales, with the death of personal dreams and the death of love itself. These extremes of
plot and characterisation allow him to develop his own personal philosophy. As JeanPaul Gourevitch states:
Au carrefour du romantisme de pacotille et de l‘idéalisme réactionnaire la légende
de Villiers apportait à une frange du public ce qu’elle attendait de la littérature:
l’exclusion du réel ‘parce que vil’. Aussi trahie par cette légende et victime d’un
style trop artiste et élaboré, l’oeuvre de Villiers s’est trouvée enclose dans le renom
de son auteur alors qu’elle le déborde de toutes parts. Avec le recul du temps nous
distinguons à quel point sa prose crispée, nerveuse, clinique, tranche à la fois sur
l’impassabilité parnassienne et sur le lyrisme complaisant de la décadence. 2
Thus Villiers is seen as a link between the curiosity which attracted Baudelaire
towards the occult and the sudden enthusiasm which enflamed the Symbolists,
together with a general exasperation at the rise of materialism in society, again part of
Baudelaire’s polemic. Villiers was admired by the Symbolists and in particular by
Verlaine who added an essay on him to his book the Poètes maudits of 1888, thus
emphasising the role of prose writers in a movement broadly considered to be poetic. 3
Kenneth Cornell explains the connection:
1
Charles Baudelaire, ‘De l’essence du rire’, Curiosités Esthétiques, ed. H. Lemaire (Paris: Classiques
Garnier, 1990), p. 245.
2
Jean-Paul Gourevitch, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: Evénements Littéraires, Artistiques et Historiques (Paris:
Editions Seghers, 1971), pp. 98-99.
3
Raitt too lays emphasis on the poetic nature of Villiers prose, when he states, ‘Villiers s’est constamment
préoccupé du rythme et de la sonorité de ses phrases, et les Symbolistes n’ont fait que renforcer cette
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Villiers saw the exterior world as a series of false and deceptive images and constantly
sought out the inner reality. The evocation of this magic world, the satire of progress
and pursuit of money, the language which suggested but did not state, the note of
revolt against the traditional, the use of symbols in a concrete sense, and above all the
strange mingling of irony, idealism, and mystery were reasons for spiritual alliance with
the symbolist poets. 4
Gourevitch condenses it even further when he states ‘Toute son oeuvre est
orientée vers la satire, la négation ou le dépassement de son époque.’ 5
Born a Count, Villiers believed firmly in his aristocratic heritage. For him,
history stopped in 1789 when the nobility lost their claim to a status in society that had
always been their birthright. 6 His family however, though titled, were impoverished;
with the passage of time, his literary focus centred on doing violence to his mortal
enemy, the bourgeois, whom he believed to be the root cause of all his misery. In this
sense, his writing can be seen to have an almost ‘criminal’ element to it. 7 Financial
security, even after the success of the Contes cruels, always eluded him. In 1886, three
years before his death, he was to be found writing L’Eve future, ‘rue de Maubeuge, dans
l’horreur glaciale, d’une chambre vidée de ses meubles, […] couché à plat ventre sur
le plancher, délayant dans de l’eau les dernières gouttes de son encrier’. 8
tendance. […Ils] ont tous décerné à Villiers le titre de ‘poète’, en pensant exclusivement à ses oeuvres en
prose.’ A. W. Raitt, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et le mouvement symboliste (Paris: Jose Corti, 1986), pp. 151152.
4
Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (Yale: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 72. Raitt is of a similar
mind, ‘Pour les Symbolistes, ce qui compte avant tout, c’est son rôle d’initiateur dans l’idéalisme qui est à la
base du mouvement, mais la lutte qu’il a soutenue contre le positivisme de son époque a aidé dans une large
mesure à leur montrer combine les horizons du matérialisme scientifiques étaient étroits. [Les Symbolistes]
trouvaient la citadelle du positivisme tellement ébranlée par les assauts de Villiers qu’ils n’avaient plus qu’à
passer outre et à construire un édifice intellectuel qui serait bien à eux’. Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement
symboliste, pp. 163-164.
5
Gourevitch, p. 98.
6
This idea brings up the theme of civil disobedience in the contes. According to Gourevitch, at the time
Villiers was writing, the provincial nobility had lost all its direct political power and certainly by the third
republic in 1875 it found itself completely isolated, refusing to accept the legitimacy of republican power or
its bourgeois representatives; through what it perceived to be moral and Christian principles it showed its
hostility to imperialism. Gourevitch, p. 83.
7
Villiers’ aristocratic pride cannot be understated for it informs his entire life as well as his literary output.
One of his earliest critics, Arthur Symons understood the importance of it when he wrote in 1899, ‘To the
aristocratic conception of things, nobility of soul is indeed a birthright, and the pride with which this gift of
nature is accepted is a pride of exactly the opposite kind to that democratic pride to which nobility of soul is a
conquest, valuable in proportion to its difficulty.’ Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(London: Heinemann, 1899), p. 22. But as Ruth Temple points out, ‘In the stories Symons perceives
tenderness and cynicism, but rather more of the former and less of the latter than their content and manner
warrant. Symons is evidently not quite attuned to Villiers’ irony.’ Ruth Z. Temple, The Critic’s Alchemy: A
Study of the Introduction of French Symbolism into England (New York: Twayne, 1953), p. 158. More
recently, Raitt confirms this aristocratic ideal as one of Villiers’ life-long obsessions, ‘Dans tout le mépris
que Villiers manifestait pour les hérésies populaires de son temps, il y a certainement un élément de dédain
aristocratique. […] Villiers lui-même a soin d’établir un lien entre son royalisme et sa haine des temps
modernes. A ses yeux, le républicanisme était un mal contemporain, coïncident avec l’avènement de la
science, le progrès, l’athéisme et le matérialisme […] et que, depuis, on assistait simplement à une succession
de désastres en expiation des crimes de la république.’ Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement symboliste, p. 181.
8
Jacques Henry Bornecque, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, créateur et visionnaire (Paris: Nizet, 1974), p.102.
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Many other titles were considered before settling on Contes cruels – ‘Histoires
moroses’, ‘Contes au fer rouge’, ‘Histoires mysterieuses’, to name but a few. In settling on
‘cruels’, Villiers betrays his desire to hurt, frighten, or at the very least, disturb the
reader; of the twenty-seven tales which make up the collection eighteen contain a
death scene. From a purely practical point of view, Villiers needed to capture an
audience and get published, hence the catchy title, the frequent morbid tone, the
deaths interspersed with a wry sense of humour – all were guaranteed to bring in
readers. In a positivist sense, death is particularly disquieting for the bourgeois, as
Raitt points out: ‘Mais c’est surtout quand le bourgeois se trouve en présence de la
mort qu’il perd tout contrôle, puisque la mort le met dans l’impossibilité de nier
l’existence d’un autre monde’. 9
Cruelty in the stories takes the form of a subtle presence as opposed to a
deliberate act. Villiers takes on the ‘criminal’ role via the use of suggestion and illusion
rather than outright attack, (though when he criticises the bourgeoisie, death is
frequently the end result). It is sometimes hard to say who is being cruel to whom cruelty is felt by the victims, but is exerted by society. For Villiers, humans, society
and destiny share in the exercise of cruelty and sometimes converge to push it to
extremes, though ultimately, it is the universe which is cruel. He demonstrates cruelty
to the reader when he expresses his perception about the truth concerning the world
in which he lives; cruelty for Villiers therefore becomes a victory, a sign of liberty and
noblesse of spirit, especially after the cruelty to which he personally felt he was
exposed via a society which had almost completely rejected him. His revenge takes the
form of the written word.
Villiers makes us laugh through certain situations and characters - exactly those
which typify the materialistic and positivist bourgeois world of the fin de siècle. His
premise is that any polemicist who seeks to mimic and adapt himself to his audience
will find that his audience will instinctively adapt themselves to his way of thinking. By
feigning praise on that which he abhors, or putting himself in the place of the one he
despises, the ironist hopes to undermine his enemies’ convictions and symbolically
execute him – there again we find the act of a ‘criminal’ writer. However, laughter in
Villiers’ stories is not simply a matter of gentle digging. It is more the expression of his
anger and his suffering – the origins of which contain real pain; there is therefore
always a malaise in our laughter.
The stories have several recurring themes based on Villiers’ generally
misanthropic view of life, namely the nobility and superiority of the aristocracy, the
9
Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement symboliste, p 174. As for Science, Villiers feels it is perverted as soon as it is
employed for monetary gain, illustrated in such stories as ‘La machine à gloire’ and ‘L’Appareil pour
l’analyse chimique du dernier soupir’. Cornell states that, ‘Villiers’ revolt against Science, so far as Science
is materialistic, and his passionate curiosity in that chimera’s flight towards the invisible, are one and the
same impulse of a mind to which only mind is interesting.’ Cornell, p. 24. The bourgeois, claims Raitt, cling
to Science as their life raft: ‘La Science est donc chargée, aux yeux du bourgeois, de la tâche d’amoindrir son
angoisse en lui fournissant des explications matérialistes et rassurantes des phénomènes susceptibles de
troubler son repos […] C’est parce que la science semble étayer la conception positiviste de l’univers que
Villiers s’en prend à elle avec tant d’amertume et de férocité.’ Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement symboliste, p.
174.
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general ignorance and coarseness of the middle classes, money as a symbol of evil,
death and the spiritual, together with the futility of love and the fickleness of women
(including prostitution). Motifs reoccur linking up like diodes, flashing their alarm.
Villiers never recovered from his lifelong disappointment in affairs of the heart;
perhaps this was an inevitable result of setting his sights too high, for he was never able
to find a woman whose beauty, in his eyes, matched her intelligence, and he constantly
castigated the opposite sex as a result of his own bitter experiences. Raitt recounts
how it was said that at parties ‘he would sidle up to couples embracing as they danced
and hiss: ‘Never fall in love!’ 10
Almost all the stories are ordered alternately, being either works uplifted by a
spirit of enthusiasm towards an ideal love, showing the ultimate sacrifice of a noble
life, (e.g. ‘Véra’, ‘Duke of Portland’), or sarcastic, humorous tales where Villiers, in a
fit of pique against his century, denounces its lack of values, its sordid utilitarianism
and its servility towards money, (e.g. ‘Les Demoiselles de Bienfilâtre’, ‘Le plus beau
dîner du monde’). 11 On the whole there are more stories which fall into this latter
category and it is these that I shall concentrate on in this article. As Villiers states in a
letter to Mallarmé, ‘Je me flatte d’avoir enfin trouvé le chemin de son coeur, au
bourgeois! Je l’ai incarné pour l’assassiner plus à loisir et plus sûrement.’ 12 Yet again
we come across evidence indicting Villiers’ writing with a ‘criminal’ element, via the
use of the word ‘assassiner’. In another letter to Mallarmé he makes this point even
more forcefully, as Raitt explains:
Qu’il s’agisse bien d’une campagne concertée, Villiers lui-même s’en félicite dès 1866
dans une lettre à Mallarmé: ‘Le fait est que je ferai du bourgeois, si Dieu me prête vie,
ce que Voltaire a fait des ‘cléricaux’, Rousseau des gentilshommes et Molière des
médecins’. Et cette campagne a duré jusqu’à la fin de sa vie.13
In ‘Le plus beau dîner du monde’, two provincial notaires, Maître Percenoix and
Maître Lecastelier, who have worked alongside each other for many years and who
have always been bitter rivals, vie to outdo each other in some way. Maître Percenoix
decides to invite a distinguished group of guests to ‘le plus beau dîner du monde’. In
the small town word soon spreads, so that there is talk of little else. Villiers mocks the
bourgeois for their ridiculous sense of self-importance, emphasised by the list he
provides of those invited:
10
A. W. Raitt, The Life of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 252.
In the story L’Intersigne’, the protagonist is made a spokesman for the thoughts underpinning the entire
collection: ‘‘O toi’, pensai-je, ‘qui n’as point l’asile de tes rêves, et pour qui la terre de Chanaan, avec ses
palmiers et ses eaux vives, n’apparaît pas, au milieu des aurores, après avoir tant marché sous de dures
étoiles, voyageur si joyeux au départ et maintenant assombri, - coeur fait pour d’autres exils que ceux dont tu
partages l’amertume avec des frères mauvais, - regarde! Ici l’on peut s’asseoir sur la pierre de la mélancolie!
– Ici les rêves morts ressuscitent, devançant les moments de la tombe! Si tu veux avoir la véritable désir de
mourir, approche: ici la vue du ciel exalte jusqu’à l’oubli!’ Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ed. by Pierre Citron,
Contes cruels (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980), p. 263. Further references to this edition are given after
quotations in the text.
12
Villiers, letter addressed to Stéphane Mallarmé (27 September 1867), in Villiers de l’Isle Adam, créateur et
visionnaire, pp. 63-64.
13
Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement symboliste, p. 166.
11
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Il y avait d’abord, le sous-préfet, donnant le bras à Mme Lecastelier; puis le receveur
particulier et le directeur de la poste; puis trois personnes d’une haute influence; puis
le docteur, donnant le bras au banquier; puis une célébrité, l’Introducteur du phylloxera
en France; puis le proviseur du lycée, et quelques propriétaires fonciers. (193)
‘L’on entra. Chacun retint son pas dans le vestibule, par dignité’ (193). With
every step they take Villiers mocks their false values. ‘Le dîner était simple: deux
potages, trois entrées, trois rôtis, trois entremets, des vins irréprochables, une demidouzaine de plats divers, puis le dessert’ (194). Finally, after general agreement that
they have all just partaken of the finest meal in the world, Maître Lecastelier, in a fit of
pique, announces that next year, he will give ‘le plus beau dîner du monde’. Villiers
shows how these characters are petty and stupid - none of them has any nobility of
soul; all they value is base and materialistic. The sting in this particular tale comes the
following year, when Maître Lecastelier presents exactly the same meal to the same
guests but with one difference – folded into each of their napkins (except for Maître
Percenoix) is a ‘napoléon’, a gold twenty franc piece. The materialism and greed of
the bourgeois means that a successful outcome to the meal has been assured:
– C’est le même diner?
– Oui, le même.
Puis, après un soupir, un silence et une grimace méditative:
– Le même, absolument.
– Cependant, n’y avait-il pas quelque chose?
– Oui, oui, il y avait quelque chose!
– Enfin, - là, - il est plus beau!
– Oui, c’est curieux. C’est le même…et, cependant, il est plus beau! (197)
The hypocritical greediness of the characters could not be more marked. Death,
as if to rub salt into the wound, comes to the utterly abject Maître Percenoix, ‘[qui],
étant plongé dans cette préoccupation, - glissa dans son escalier et fit une chute dont il
décéda’ (198). The rivalry over the dinner inadvertently causes his death. The realism
in this story – there are no grotesque characters, no ghosts, no surreal occurrences,
enables Villiers to project his message through the apparent everyday actions and
words of the characters and narrator. Material profit is everything to the bourgeois –
one single piece of gold marks the difference between two identical dinners.
In ‘Les Demoiselles de Bienfilâtre’, Villiers takes a different stance by abolishing
the frontiers between morality and immorality and inviting us to question the relativity
attributed to these standards by bourgeois attitudes. Using the equally conflicting
worlds of virtue and vice, he brings forth a kaleidoscopic array of standards,
contradictory in every detail. The dilemma of the demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, content
in their life of prostitution, condoned by their parents and the society in which they
live as a respectable way of earning money, is that a respectable prostitute falls into
disgrace if she submits her body with any other view except the hope of gain, even
under the license of a poor but honest marriage. As Villiers points out somewhat
mockingly to his reader near the beginning of the story, ‘Les actes sont donc
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indifférents en tant que physiques: la conscience de chacun les fait, seule, bons ou
mauvais’ (36).
The story is recounted in a tone of mock gravity. Olympe and Henriette,
daughters of the impoverished M. Bienfilâtre arrive at a large central Parisian café as
dusk falls – already our senses are alerted to this abnormal behaviour of ‘normal’ well
brought up young ladies. ‘[Elles] surveillaient le passant d’un oeuil méticuleux’ (37).
They are, of course, looking for custom – they are prostitutes. Villiers then goes on to
shock the reader even further by demonstrating the collusion of their impoverished
parents in the girls’ chosen career, from a distressingly tender age:
Soeurs de joie depuis leur plus tendre enfance, elles consacrèrent le prix de leurs veilles
et de leurs sueurs à entretenir une aisance modeste, il est vrai, mais honorable dans la
loge. – ‘Dieu bénit nos efforts’, disaient-elles parfois, car on leur avait inculqué de
bons principes […]’. (37)
The world has been turned on its head. How can parents who turn their young
daughters out to prostitution in order to help with the family income be termed ‘gens
intègres’? (37) Villiers however makes their choice of career sound high-principled,
sacrificial and well-intentioned to the point that it becomes almost mundane, run of
the mill and unquestionable in its morality: ‘Rangées, elles fermaient le dimanche’
(38), since all self respecting people rest on the Sabbath. What is more, ‘Leur devise
était: ‘Célérité, Sécurité, Discretion’; et, surs leur cartes de visite, elles ajoutaient:
‘Spécialités’ (38). What well-ordered lives these girls lead!
Their downfall comes when Olympe, the younger sister, makes the grave error
of falling in love, thus betraying her profession, her sister, her family - yes, says
Villiers, even her entire class. For when love enters the equation, then money no
longer plays its part and that is unforgivable and shameful. ‘De ce jour, tous ces
devoirs furent oubliés. Tout alla sans ordre et à la débandade’ (39). Provocatively, and
of course implausibly, it is Henriette, the hard working prostitute, who blushes with
shame at the antics of her sister, ‘Et sa soeur, hélas! Cette noble Henriette, qui
maintenant pliait, comme on dit, sous le fardeau!’ (39). The lover asks the father for
Olympe’s hand in marriage and elicits this response, ‘Misérable!’ s’était exclamé
Bienfilâtre en s’enfuyant, révolté de ce ‘cynisme’’ (40). Eventually Olympe takes to
her bed, literally dying of shame. To the priest who comes to administer the last rites
she says, ‘J’ai eu un amant!’ […] s’accusant ainsi de son déshonneur […] ‘Un amant,
pour le plaisir! Sans rien gagner!’ Là était le crime’ (41-42). In the final deathbed
scene, the student lover walks in – happening to be clinking some coins sent by his
parents to pay an examination fee. Jumping to the wrong conclusion, Olympe’s face
breaks into one last smile before she dies, exclaiming, ‘Il a éclairé!’ (43). Her love has
finally been vindicated – he has done the honourable thing, not in marrying her but in
paying for her love – the irony being of course that he was doing no such thing.
Olympe dies because of the mentality of the society in which she lives. Villiers
understood that money will always have the last word.
By placing ‘Les Demoiselles de Bienfilâtre’ at the beginning of the collection
Villiers emphasises his attack on the bourgeois from the start; the whole story
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becomes an ironic moral dissertation. His contemporaries particularly enjoyed this tale
set in a strangely perverted world. Catulle Mendes wrote in La Vie Populaire, ‘L’atroce
cruauté du sujet, la froideur implacable d’une ironie souvent imperceptible, donnent
par instants le vertige et vous font frissoner’. 14
Villiers is never particularly interested in the development of either the narrative
or the characters – his point-scoring against the bourgeois remains his sole objective,
to show how the world created by them and their thirst for money is positivist,
materialistic and must be denounced. As Raitt underlines, ‘Aucun doute ne vient
troubler sa foi dans la véritable croisade qu’il mène contre le positivisme et le
matérialisme.’ 15 He goes on to point out that of course, Villiers was not the first
French writer to attack the bourgeois, ‘On pense à la fureur horrifiée de Flaubert, aux
plaisanteries amères de Baudelaire et à la moquerie irritée de Poe […] mais peu
d’écrivains ont montés des attaques aussi acerbes et aussi fréquentes que celles de
Villiers.’ 16 There is, too, a dialectic of the positive versus the negative - a continuous
sense of duality; sometimes his characters become puppets, used as a conduit for his
polemic, in other stories it is the idealist, abused aristocrats who represent the
author. 17 In his published work Villiers continually flouted convention by refusing to
flatter public taste; Cornell, sees this as a particular failing:
In the sense in which that word is ordinarily used, Villiers has no pathos. This is enough
to explain why he can never, in the phrase he would have disliked so greatly, ‘touch the
popular heart’. His mind is too abstract to contain pity, and it is in his lack of pity that
he seems to put himself outside humanity. 18
Perhaps, then, in this lack of humanity the assassin returns to the place where he
started and becomes, once more, the assassinated. And yet, for many of his
generation, he remained the most revered author of his time and many writers felt –
and still feel - his influence. His literary voice was unmistakably his own, with its
clarity of expression and purpose, even if he was on the margins of society, exiled
within his own country, both by virtue of being an aristocrat and through the penury
he suffered during his life. The stories are parodies full of ironic humour, tormenting
14
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ed., by Alan Raitt and Pierre-Georges Castex, Oeuvres Completes, Vol. 1 (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 1986), p. 1264.
15
Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement symboliste, p. 164. This view is also expressed by Gustav Kahn: ‘Partout,
dans l’oeuvre de Villiers, contes ironiques, contes philosophiques, drames à longs pans allégoriques, cet
hégélianisme poussé au nihilisme presque vis-à-vis du monde extérieur.’ Gustav Kahn, Symbolistes et
décadents (Paris: Léon Vanier, 1902), p. 211.
16
Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement symboliste, p. 166.
17
Pierre Citron explains this point further, ‘Surtout, on voit se dégager une série de personnages qui sont
moins Villiers lui-même que l’image qu’il se faisait de ce qu’il aurait pu ou dû être – ‘tel qu’en lui-même’
aurait dit son ami Mallarmé.’ Contes Cruels, p. 18.
18
Cornell, pp. 29-30. Raitt too concurs and says, ‘L’ambiguïté de beaucoup des oeuvres de Villiers est faite
pour dérouter, pour inquiéter, pour alerter, pour avertir. […] Bien entendu, avec de telles intentions, il ne
pouvait guère espérer se faire beaucoup d’amis parmi le grand public; il devait faire appel surtout à ceux qui
étaient déjà inclins à partager ses opinions. Mais le courage même avec lequel Villiers avait maintenu, envers
et contre tous, ses protestations passionnées lui a valu beaucoup d’amis parmi les jeunes gens de 1880, qui,
eux, ne croyaient plus aux idoles de leurs pères. Villiers était a leurs yeux la victime de l’ordre de choses
qu’il passait sa vie à dénoncer.’ Raitt, Villiers et le mouvement symboliste, p. 184. He concludes: ‘C’est ainsi
que l’idéalisme intransigeant de Villiers finit par le mener à un nihilisme intégral.’ Ibid., p 254.
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us at the same time as making us laugh, whilst expounding his mistrust of Science, his
contempt for the bourgeois way of life and sometimes inevitably demonstrating for us
his pessimism, via death, in the face of these formidable enemies. 19 His subversive
attitude is revealed in the way the reader is manipulated by his subtly cruel irony,
effected by means of his razor-sharp prose and his naturally sadistic temperament.
Utilising such themes as violence, criminality, materialism and death – coated with this
ironic veneer – Villiers attacks his enemies via his reader in a symbolic gesture of anger
and defiance.
19
‘All Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s work expresses disgust with the material world, and interest only in the ideal
beyond this life. He was a Breton, a Celt, with his gaze fixed on the land of Tir-nan-Og, the Isles of the Blest,
beyond the setting sun. At the heart of his inspiration was belief in the sacrifice of the present for the sake of
the ideal future.’ Enid Starkie, From Gautier to Eliot: The Influence of France on English Literature 18511939 (London: Hutchinson, 1970), p. 89.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baudelaire, Charles, ‘De L’essence du rire’, Curiosités Esthétiques ed. by H. Lemaire
(Paris : Classiques Garnier, 1990, p. 245.
Bornecque, Jacques Henry, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, créateur et visionnaire (Paris : Nizet,
1974), p. 102.
Cornell, Kenneth, The Symbolist Movement (Yale: Yale University Press, 1951).
Gourevitch, Jean-Paul, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam: Evénements Littéraires, Artistiques et
Historiques (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1971).
Huneker, James, Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists (New York: Scribners, 1905).
Kahn, Gustav, Symbolistes et Décadents (Paris: Librairie Léon Vanier, 1902).
Quennell, Peter, Baudelaire and the Symbolists: Five Essays (London: Chatto and Windus,
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Gerri Kimber