Paris 2015: Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #10

'A. de VILLIERS de L'ISLE ADAM
NÉ À ST. BRIEUC LE 7 NOVEMBRE 1838,
MORT À PARIS LE 18 AOÛT 1889.'

 

Tucked away in the barely frequented north-west of Père-Lachaise is the grave of Auguste de Villers de L'Isle-Adam, the Brittany-born writer who had such an important influence in the birth of French symbolism. In 1867 he became editor-in-chief of the weekly Revue des Lettres et des Arts, to which Mallarmé, Verlaine, Banville, Mendès and the Goncourt brothers contributed.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam wrote novels, short stories, drama and poetry. Of particular note is the science fiction novel L'Ève future (1886), which is partly a criticism of  the scientific jargon of the day: it involves an engineer called Edison creating a beautiful and highly intelligent android to cure Lord Ewald of his doomed love of a beautiful but stupid girl. The collection of short stories Tribulat Bonhomet (1887), of which a rewrite of 'Claire Lenoir' from his weekly Revue of twenty years before is included, is a strong satire on the bourgeois mind.

 

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam died of cancer at the age of fifty.