Count Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam — more names than most of us could use in a couple of lifetimes — was an occultist, a philosopher of sorts, and a writer (usually connected with the Symbolist movement of late C19 France) of dramas and other strange works, as perhaps evidenced by the fact he is best known today as the author of Contes Cruels (Cruel Tales), short stories inspired by that same debt to Poe which most of the French Symbolists acknowledge in one form or another.
Consists largely of links to Villiers' works, but don't miss the appropriately lurid illustrations to the first edition of the translation of "A Torture by Hope." [Larry Roberts]
by Arthur B. Evans. This essay, published in Science Fiction Studies, includes some discussion of Villiers' Gothic (and philosophical) parody Claire Lenoir.
