Jean-Marie Mathias Philippe-Auguste Comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1838-1889) came from an old, impoverished noble family and was a dreamy and hypersensitive child. Since 1857, he lived in Paris, where he made a living as a journalist and became friends with Mallarmé and Baudelaire. Influenced by Poe and Richard Wagner, he wrote plays ("Axel"), novels ("The Eve of the Future"), and especially stories with often grotesque and gruesome content, in which he exercised radical criticism of the morals of his time. Villiers de L'Isle-Adam is considered one of the most significant French novella writers of the 19th century.