All his life Villiers was a poor man; though, all his life, he was awaiting that fortune which he refused to anticipate by any mean employment. During most of his life, he was practically an unknown man. Greatly loved, ardently admired, by that inner circle of the men who have made modern French literature, from Verlaine to Maeterlinck, he was looked upon by most people as an amusing kind of madman, a little dangerous, whose ideas, as they floated freely over the café-table, it was at times highly profitable to steal. For Villiers talked his works before writing them, and sometimes he talked them instead of writing them, in his too royally spendthrift way. To those who knew him he seemed genius itself, and would have seemed so if he had never written a line; for he had the dangerous gift of a personality which seems to have already achieved all that it so energetically contemplates. But personality tells only within hands' reach; and Villiers failed even to startle, failed even to exasperate, the general reader. That his _Premières Poésies,_ published at I the age of nineteen, should have brought him fame was hardly to be expected, remarkable, especially in its ideas, as that book is. Nor was it to be expected of the enigmatic fragment of a romance, _Isis_ (1862), anticipating, as it does, by so long a period, the esoteric and spiritualistic romances which were to have their vogue. But _Elën_ (1864) and _Morgane_ (1865), those two poetic dramas in prose, so full of distinction, of spiritual rarity; but two years later, _Claire Lenoir_ (afterwards incorporated in one of his really great books, _Tribulat Bonhomet_), with its macabre horror; but _La Révolte_ (1870), for Villiers so "actual," and which had its moments of success when it was revived in 1896 at the Odéon; but _Le Nouveau Monde_ (1880), a drama which, by some extraordinary caprice, won a prize; but _Les Contes Cruels_ (1880), that collection of masterpieces, in which the essentially French _conte_ is outdone on its own ground! It was not till 1886 that Villiers ceased to be an unknown writer, with the publication of that phosphorescent buffoonery of science, that vast parody of humanity, _L'Eve Future. Tribulat Bonhomet_ (which he himself denned as _bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, couleur du siècle_) was to come, in its final form, and the superb poem in prose _Akëdysséril;_ and then, more and more indifferent collections of stories, in which Villiers, already dying, is but the shadow of himself: _L'Amour Suprême_ (1886), _Histoires Insolites_ (1888), _Nouveaux Contes Cruels_ (1888). He was correcting the proofs of _Axël_ when he died; the volume was published in 1890, followed by _Propos d'au-delà,_ and a series of articles, _Chez les Passants._ Once dead, the fame which had avoided him all his life began to follow him; he had _une belle presse_ at his funeral.