the Low Countries. Marlborough’s own difficulties with the Dutch and other allied commissioners, rather than Villeroi’s own skill, put off the inevitable disaster for some years, but in 1706 the duke attacked him and thoroughly defeated him at Ramillies (q.v.) . Louis consoled his old friend with the remark, “At our age, one is no longer, lucky,” but superseded him in the command, and henceforward Villeroi lived the life of a courtier, much busied with intrigues but retaining to the end the friendship of his master. He died on the 18th of July 1730 at Paris.
VILLERS LA VILLE, a town of Belgium in the province of Brabant, 2 m. E. of Quatre Bras, with a station on the direct line from Louvain to Charleroi Pop. (1904) 1166. It is chiefly interesting on account of the fine ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Villers founded in 1147 and destroyed by the French republicans in 1795. In the ruined church attached to the abbey are still to be seen the tombstones of several dukes of Brabant of the 13th and 14th centuries.
VILLETTE, CHARLES, Marquis de (1736–1793), French writer and politician, was born in Paris on the 4th of December 1736, the son of a financier who left him a large fortune and the title of marquis. After taking part in the Seven Years' War, young Villette returned in 1763 to Paris, where he made many enemies by his insufferable manners. But he succeeded in gaining the intimacy of Voltaire, who had known his mother and who wished to make a poet of him. The old philosopher even went so far as to call his protégé the French Tibullus. In 1777, on Voltaire’s advice, Villette married Mademoiselle de Varicourt, but the marriage was unhappy, and his wife was subsequently adopted by Voltaire’s niece, Madame Denis. During the Revolution Villette publicly burned his letters of nobility, wrote revolutionary articles in the Chronique de Paris, and was elected deputy to the Convention by the department of Seine-et-Oise. He had the courage to censure the September massacres and to vote for the imprisonment only, and not for the death, of Louis XVI. He died in Paris on the 7th of July 1793.
In 1784 he published his Œuvres, which are of little value, and in 1792 his articles in the Chronique de Paris appeared in book form under the title Lettres choisies sur les principaux événements de la Révolution.
VILLIERS, CHARLES PELHAM (1802–1898), English statesman, son of George Villiers, grandson of the 1st earl of Clarendon of the second (Villiers) creation, and brother of the 4th earl (q.v), was born in London on the 3rd of January 1802, and educated at St John’s College, Cambridge. He read for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, and became an associate of the Benthamites and “philosophical radicals” of the day. He was an assistant commissioner to the Poor Law Commission (1832), and in 1833 was made by the master of the Rolls, whose secretary he had been, a chancery examiner of witnesses, holding this office till 1852. In 1835 he was elected M.P. for Wolverhampton, and retained his seat till his death. He was the pioneer of the free-trade movement, and became prominent with Cobden and Bright as one of its chief supporters, being indefatigable in pressing the need for free trade on the House of Commons, by resolution and by petition. After free trade triumphed in 1846 his importance in politics became rather historical than actual, especially as he advanced to a venerable old age; but he was president of the Poor Law Board, with a seat in the Cabinet, from 1859 to 1866, and he did other useful work in the Liberal reforms of the time. Like Bright, he parted from Mr Gladstone on Home Rule for Ireland. He attended parliament for the last time in 1895, and died on the 16th of January 1898.
VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM, PHILIPPE AUGUSTE MATHIAS, Comte de (1838–1889), French poet, was born at St Brieuc in Brittany and baptized on the 28th of November 1838. He may be said to have inaugurated the Symbolist movement in French literature, and Axël, the play on which he was engaged during so much of his life, though it was only published after his death, is the typical Symbolist drama. He began with a volume of Premières Poésies (1856–58). This was followed by a wild romance of the supernatural, Isis (1862), and by two plays in prose, Elën (1866) and Morgane (1866). La Révolte, a play in which Ibsen’s Doll’s House seems to be anticipated, was represented at the Vaudeville in 1870; Contes cruels, his finest volume of short stories, in 1883, and a new series in 1889; Le Nouveau Monde, a drama in five acts, in 1880; L’Ève future, an amazing piece of buffoonery satirizing the pretensions of science, in 1886; Tribulat Bonhomet in 1887; Le Secret de l’échafaud in 1888; Axël in 1890. He died in Paris, under the care of the Frères Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, on the 19th of August 1889. Villiers has left behind him a legend probably not more fantastic than the truth. Sharing many of the opinions of Don Quixote, he shared also Don Quixote’s life. He was the descendant of a Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, famous in history, and his pride as an aristocrat and as an idealist were equal. He hated mediocrity, science, progress, the present age, money and “serious” people. In one division of his work he attacked all the things which he hated with a savage irony; in another division of his work he discovered at least some glimpses of the ideal world. He remains a remarkable poet and a remarkable satirist, imperfect as both. He improvised out of an abundant genius, but the greater part of his work was no more than improvisation. He was accustomed to talk his stories before he wrote them. Sometimes he talked them instead of writing them. But he has left, at all events, the Contes cruels, in which may be found every classic quality of the French conte, together with many of the qualities of Edgar Allan Poe and Ernst Hoffman, and the drama of Axël, in which the stage takes a new splendour and a new subtlety of meaning. Villiers’s influence on the younger French writers was considerable. It was always an exaltation. No one in his time followed a literary ideal more romantically. (A. Sy.)
See also R. du Pontavice de Heussey, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1893), a biography, English trans. (1904) by Lady Mary Loyd; S. Mallarmé, Les Miens. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1892); R. Martineau, Un vivant et deux morts (1901), bibliography. A selection from his stories, Histoires souveraines, was made by his friends (Brussels, 1899).
VILLINGEN, a town of Germany in the grand duchy of Baden, pleasantly situated amid well-wooded hills, 52 m. by rail N. of Schaffhausen. Pop. (1905) 9582. It is in part still surrounded by walls, with ancient gate towers. It is the chief seat of the watch-making industry of the Black Forest. It also produces musical-boxes, glass and silk, and has a Gothic church of the 13th century and another of the 11th, a 15th-century town hall, with a museum of antiquities, and music, technical and agricultural schools.
VILLOISON, JEAN BAPTISTS GASPARD D’ANSSE (or Dannse) DE (1750–1805), French classical scholar, was born at Corbeil-sur-Seine on the 5th of March 1750 (or 1753, authorities differ). He belonged to a noble family (De Ansso) of Spanish origin, and took his surname from a village in the neighbourhood. In 1773 he published the Homeric Lexicon of Apollonius from a MS. in the abbey of Saint Germain des Prés. In 1778 appeared his edition of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. In 1781 he went to Venice, where he spent three years in examining the library, his expenses being paid by the French government. His chief discovery was a 10th-century MS. of the Iliad, with ancient scholia and marginal notes, indicating supposititious, corrupt or transposed verses. After leaving Venice, he accepted the invitation of the duke of Saxe-Weimar to his court. Some of the fruits of his researches in the library of the palace were collected into a volume (Epistolae Vinarienses, 1783), dedicated to his royal hosts. Hoping to find a treasure similar to the Venetian Homer in Greece, he returned to Paris to prepare for a journey to the East. He visited Constantinople, Smyrna, the Greek islands, and Mount Athos, but the results did not come up to his expectation. In 1786 he returned, and in 1788 brought out the Codex Venetus of Homer, which created a sensation in the learned world. When the revolution broke out, being banished from Paris, he lived in retirement at Orléans, occupying himself chiefly with the transcription of the notes
