‘Hidden Assassin: Subverting the Bourgeois in Villiers de L’Isle–Adam’s Contes Cruels’, 2001 Group: Essays in French Studies, 1, (September 2005), ISSN 1749–3307. (original) (raw)

Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, (1838-89), impoverished literary aristocrat, friend to Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Wagner, is widely considered, alongside Maupassant, to be the principle storyteller of his age. His tales, the Contes cruels, published in 1883, follow the French tradition of the Fantastic, offering variants on the ghost story and the supernatural escapade, charged with an ornate spiritualism, frequently icy in tone and savage in their irony. Black humour is often used as a critical device; Villiers’ perception was that, as readers, we are naturally more receptive to a critic who makes us laugh rather than one who attacks us.