VILLERS LA VILLE, a village 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. (192o) 1,059. It is chiefly interesting on account of the fine ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Villers founded in 1147 and destroyed by the French in VILLIERS, BARBARA: see CLEVELAND, DUCHESS OF. VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM, PHILIPPE AU GUSTE MATHIAS, COMTE DE (1838-1889), French poet, was born at St. Brieuc in Brittany and baptized on Nov. 28, 1838. He may be said to have inaugurated the Symbolist movement in French literature, and Axel, 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 Premieres Poesies (1856-58). This was followed by a wild romance of the supernatural, Isis (1862), and by two plays in prose, Elen (1866) and Morgane (1866). La Revolte, a play in which Ibsen's Doll's House seems to be anticipated, was repre sented at the Vaudeville in 187o; 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 188o, L'Eve future, an amazing piece of buffoonery satirizing the pretensions of science, in 1886; Tribulat Bonhomet in 1887; Le Secret de l'echafaud in 1888; Axel in 189o. He died in Paris, under the care of the Freres Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, on the 19th of August 1889.
Villiers has left behind him a legend probably not more fan tastic than the truth. Sharing many of the opinions of Don Quixote, he shared also Don Quixote's life. He was the descend
ant of the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, famous in his tory, and his pride as an aristocrat and as an idealist were equal. He hated mediocrity, science, progress, the present age, money and "serious" people.
He remains a remarkable poet and a remarkable satirist, im perfect 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 Axel, 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 exalta tion. No one in his time followed a literary ideal more romanti cally. (A. SY.) See also R. du Pontavice de Heussey, Villiers de (1893), a biography, English trans. (1904) by Lady Mary Loyd; S. MaHarm& Les Miens. Villiers de (1892) ; R. Martineau, Un vivant et deux morts 0900, bibliography. A selection from his stories, Histoires souveraines, was made by his friends (Brussels, 1899) ; there is a translation of the Contes cruels by Hamish Miles (Sardonic Tales, 1927).