That his Premières Poésies, published at 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 phosphorescence buffoonery of science, that vast parody of humanity, L'Eve Future.
