Complex, but we may see a double spirit in him. There were two essentially dissimilar writers in him, the romanticist and the ironist. The romanticist was the first to come to birth and the last to die: _Elen_ and _Morgane; Akedysseril_ and _Axel._ Villiers, the ironist, author of _Tribulat Bonhomet_, is intermediate between these two romantic phases; _l'Ève future_ should be described as a mixture of these two so diverse elements, for the book with its overwhelming irony is also a book of love.
Villiers at once realized himself by fancy and irony, making his fancy ironic, when life disgusted him even with fancy. No one has been more subjective. His characters are created with particles of his soul, raised, in the same way as a mystery, to the state of authentic, complete souls. If it is a dialogue, he will cause a certain character to utter philosophies quite above his normal understanding of things. In _Axel_, the abbess speaks of hell as Villiers might have spoken of Hegelianism, whose deceptions he learned towards the end, after having accepted its large certitudes in the beginning: "It is done! the child already experiences the ravishment and intoxications of Hell!" He experienced them: as a Baudelairian, he loved blasphemy for its occult effects, the immense risk of a pleasure taken at the expense of God himself. Sacrilege is in acts, blasphemy in words. He believed in words more than in realities, which are but the tangible shadows of words, for it is quite evident, and by a very simple syllogism, that if there is no thought in the absence of words, no more is there matter in the absence of thought. He believed in the power of words to the point of superstition. The only visible corrections of the second over the first text of Axel, for example, consist in the adjunction of words of a special ending, as when, to evoke an ecclesiastic and conventual society, he uses _proditoire, prémonitoire, satisfactoire_, and _fruition, collaudation_, etc. This very sense of the mystic powers of syllabic articulation stimulates him towards the quest of names as strange as _le Desservant de l'office des Morts_, a church function which never existed unless at the monastery of Saint Apollodora; or _l'Homme-qui-marche-sous-terre_, a name no Indian carried outside of the scenes of the _Nouveau-Monde_.