De Lisle Adam De Villiers

Vocation

Lifestyle

French symbolist writer. As a child Villoers composed poetry and music. In 1860, his aunt gave him enough money to allow him to live in the capital permanently. He had already acquired a reputation in literary circles for his inspired, alcohol-fuelled monologues. Villiers began living a Bohemian life. Disaster came in 1871 with the death of Villiers' aunt and the end of her financial support. Though Villiers had many admirers in literary circles (the most important being his close friend Stéphane Mallarmé), mainstream newspapers found his fiction too eccentric to be saleable and few theatres risked putting on his plays. Villiers was forced to take odd jobs to support his family: he gave boxing lessons and apparently worked in a funeral parlour and as a mountebank's assistant for a time. According to his friend Léon Bloy, Villiers was so poor he had to write most of his novel L'Eve future lying on his belly on bare floorboards because the bailiffs had taken away all the furniture. His poverty only increased his sense of aristocratic pride. In 1881 Villiers stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the legitimist party. By the 1880s, there was some change in fortune: Villiers' fame began to grow, but not his finances. On 19 August 1889 Villiers was dying of stomach cancer. On his deathbed, he finally married Marie Dantine, thus legitimising his beloved son "Totor". Link to Wikipedia biography