Villiers De Research Articles

Golden Cylinders: Inscription and Intertext in L’Eve future

Golden Cylinders: Inscription and Intertext in L ’Eve future John Anzalone I N HIS INNOVATIVE STUDY OF LES MACHINES CÉLIBA­ TAIRES (1954) Michel Carrouges returns repeatedly to inscription as one of the key elements of the bachelor machines. Each of the instruments presented in the works discussed by Carrouges contains a device or, more ambiguously, a zone that determines the effective func­ tion of the machine, and defines it in terms of reflexivity, solitude or redundance: the needles of Kafka’s harrow, for example, inscribe the Law from above into the ready (and willing?) flesh of the victim; the upper plate or “ fourth dimension” of Duchamp’s large glass, La Mariée mise à nue par ses célibataires, même, sends the silly bachelors sliding and spinning in their pursuit of the unreachable bride they hope to lay bare. In various other examples, Carrouges proposes inscription as the primary theoretical feature of these oddly compelling mechanisms; the implicit suggestion is that a bachelor machine would cease to function without some inscriptive device or, as we might more readily say now, without a program. But while he insists upon the inescapable presence of inscription and inscribing devices and emphasizes their significance in the elaboration of the bachelor machine, Carrouges rarely attempts an analysis of their nature or importance to a given text. This essay will take a closer look at the phenomenon of inscription and what it portends in one of the most haunting and unusual texts of fin de siècle narrative fiction, Villiers de l’lsle-Adam’s L ’Eve future (1886).' Both Carrouges and, later, Deleuze and Guattari in L ’Anti-Œdipe, present Villiers’ novel as a paradigm for 1. Carrouges summarizes the incidences of inscription in L ’Eve future but does not sharpen the focus of what is perhaps the central element in his formulation of the bachelor machine myth. See Michel Carrouges, Les Machines célibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954), pp. 146-49. See also H. Szeemann, Junggesellenmaschinen/Les Machines célibataires (Venise: Alfieri, 1975), the catalogue of the 1975 exhibition held at the Musée des Arts décoratifs. See also Rodolphe Gasché on L ’Eve future and undecidability for some pertinent remarks on the question of inscription: R. Gasché, “ The Stelliferous Fold: On Villiers de l’lsle-Adam’s L ’Eve Future,” Studies in Romanticism, No. 22 (Summer 1983), pp. 293-327. 38 W in t e r 1986 A n za lo n e the bachelor and desiring machine myths. Carrouges states that Villiers had an acute awareness of the implications his android Hadaly had with regard to what we might call the sexual politics of the decadent period: “ [...] il est le premier après Poe à évoquer une machine authentiquement célibataire. Il possède une conscience aiguë de ce que signifie pareille entreprise de son imagination [...] il aboutit à la peinture, peut-être unique, d’une hiérogamie artificielle manquée” (op. cit., p. 145). And Deleuze and Guattari claim that Hadaly’s Golden Cylinders contain “ the most impressive sort of inscriptions.”2 In the same passage of AntiOedipus the authors claim that the transfiguration of the desiring machine (their formulation for the next “ stage” of the machine céliba­ taire), its manifestation of what they call “ solar force,” is not the result of the inscriptions it contains. In the case of L ’Evefuture, however, such a claim is debatable: virtually everything the android Hadaly produces in terms of energies she commands and releases both in herself and in others can be traced back to the inscriptions with which her creators endow her; moreover, the novel’s thematic and metaphoric structures place inscription at its very heart, in the same place, in effect, that the Golden Cylinders occupy in Hadaly’s anatomy. Villiers’ novel, it will be recalled, recounts what transpires when, to repay a moral debt, the scientist-inventor Edison undertakes to rescue Lord Celian Ewald from that most drastic of fictional disasters, a love affair with the wrong woman. And why, one might well ask, is the actress Alicia Clary the wrong woman? Quite simply, in the implacable logic of Villiers’ universe, because though her body is sublime perfection, her soul...

リラダン「未来のイヴ」におけるアダリーのメカニズム 随想風に

リラダン「未来のイヴ」におけるアダリーのメカニズム 随想風に

Robert Graves: His Life and Work (review)

Reviews Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. PP. xiii + 609; 19 illustrations . $22.50. Robert Graves is not usually considered a modernist poet. His syntax is clear, his form is regular, and his main subject is love. Preferring to align himself with traditional English poets from Skelton to Hardy, he has vehemently dissociated himself from Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Despite Graves's choice of antecedents, Martin Seymour-Smith's biography suggests a link between Graves and his contemporaries by dramatizing the depth of his dread of vulgarity. Modernists' use of "vulgar" as their supreme pejorative epithet reflects more than contempt for philistine materialism; it also betrays an ambition to attain an aristocratic superiority to bourgeois respectability. The hauteur of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam's epigram, "As for living, our servants will do that for us," has social as well as aesthetic implications. Declaring themselves exempt from the rules of conventional morality on the strength of their fealty to higher values, some modernists imitated upper-class mores; others simply disregarded common decency. But pursuing an impersonal ideal in their art did not help them shape their personal lives. This biography illustrates the results of believing oneself superior to vulgarity in life as well as in art. By modernists standards, any biography is vulgar in its concern with the particularities of a life, especially sex and money, but this book makes vulgarity one of its themes. Seymour-Smith follows the 364 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 development of Graves's vocabulary for this trait from "wet," the term of his school days, to plain "vulgar," to absolute "goddawful." Its definition kept expanding. Sentimentality and hysteria were certainly vulgar , but so was any expression of personal feeling. Spending money was vulgar, but so was not having any to spend. Prudery was vulgar, but so was lust. Anything concerned with life rather than art was vulgar. Such a definition made the ambition to avoid vulgarity futile, but Seymour-Smith blames Graves's failure on Laura Riding, the American poet who lived with Graves from 1926 to 1939. Their mutual aim of making their poems and lives consistent with an absolute standard is judged misguided idealism in Graves but crass vulgarity in Riding. Although Graves regarded Riding as a necessity to his life and work, Seymour-Smith treats her as a scapegoat for the excesses of his subject. This bias makes the book's interpretations less reliable than its comprehensive account of events. Seymour-Smith has known Graves since 1943 and benefits from the cooperation of Graves, his wife Beryl, and many of their friends. They have provided documentation of their reminiscences in diaries, letters received, letters written but not mailed, telegrams, even scribbled notes more than fifty years old. In addition, an anonymous donor sent him a lifetime's collection of "Ridingiana," which informs his account of the association of Graves and Riding, the center of Graves' career as well as this book. Presented in a lucid narrative, all this data will constitute the basis of future debates. As a source of information, this biography will be as "indispensable" as the book jacket blurb claims. Knowing Riding objects to discussions of her work in relation to Graves's, Seymour-Smith professes his respect for her but in fact assaults her reputation. In 1970 he wrote an appreciation of her work in the Review and subsequently sought her cooperation on a proposed biography. She demanded that he treat her work apart from Graves's and further that he cease to communicate with Graves. This was a strict condition indeed, and Seymour-Smith could not fulfill it. Although I tried to comply with both prohibitions a few years later, she felt that my book (Laura Riding's Pursuit of Truth, Ohio University Press, 1979) also failed to portray her justly. I am certainly not Riding 's authroized defender, but blatant distortions of literary history must be corrected. Seymour-Smith's thesis is that Graves was the victim of domineering women—his mother, his first wife, Riding, and a series of young women. They are presented as the sexual objective correlatives REVIEWS 365 for his myth...

The Occultism of the Text

Literature, and sometimes other art, lays claim to a form of knowledge which is other than and transcends the given of the non-art world, but has affinities with religious and magical systems; the perennial philosophy.' We might substitute art for in the following quotation from Paracelsus's De Occulta Philosophia without exaggerating the claims made on behalf of literary work: Magic has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly. (quoted in Candish 1967:135). In the execution of literature, precision and secret knowledge become vital, its mystique is frequently impenetrable to non-initiates, the numinous is often evoked, or terror inspired as a means of defamiliarization. Just as in magic and religion, the emotional poles of love and dread are elicited: the invocatory text moves between them by a process analogous to sympathetic magic, while the incantatory text hypnotizes and renders the reader spellbound, lost in a labyrinth with unwinding print for clue. The form of knowledge to which literature has particularly laid claim reached its zenith in the occultism of the symbol, described in detail by John Senior in The Way Down and Out: Occultism in Symbolist Literature (1959), and briefly in William York Tindall's The Literary Symbol (1967). The occult symbolists like Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Yeats, learned their magic from such sources as Eliphas Levi's Dogme de la Haut Magie (1861), and claimed, with Villiers de l'Isle Adam, that there is a secret connection between poetry and the ancient methods of magic [...] both evoke the hidden object by allusive words, never direct. (Adam, quoted in Tindall 1967:55). The overt occultism of the symbolists is however, merely an extension of the formulations by romantic writers such as we see in Whitman's See, steamers steaming through my poetry.'2 Here language approaches the platonic ideal without passing through the middle phase of embodiment as the phenomenal. Apprehending the world as symbol, the poet recreates the act of perception through language alone.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Life of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. By A. W. RAITT. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1981. xviii + 452 pp. £25.00. W. N. INCE W. N. INCE SOUTHAMPTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3, July 1982, Pages 346–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XXXVI.3.346 Published: 01 July 1982

Theatre and Alchemy by Bettina L. Knapp (review)

572 Book Reviews yourself." Here Ossar stops and thus omits the crux of the whole speech, ofthe play, and possibly also of Toller's entire "anarchist" philosophy; "Wir miissen der Anarchie von oben die Ordnung von uoten entgegensetzen." ("We must counter the anarchy from above with order from below.") This, then, is the clue, and it leads us directly to Pastor Hall, a drama mentioned only in passing. Hall, too, tries to create order below in opposition to the anarchy above, i.e.• Nazism. As Ossar reminds us, Toller disliked labels! if label we must, perhaps "ethical autonomy," a teoo Ossar employs on p. 81, would have been better as a description of Toller's work. In any case, some qualifier should have been added to tone down the stridency of the label "anarchism" in the book's title, especially in view of Webster's definition of "anarchist" ("One who uses violent means to overthrow the established order"), the I911 Encyclopaedia Britannica addition to Kropotkin's article on anarchism, and Bertrand Russell's remarks (both cited by Ossar), and the fact that, in popular usage, anarchist is practically synonymous with assassin. Such modifiers as are used, for example, in the titles of the publications on Gustav Landauer and Ernst Junger, also abound in Ossar's book, tenns like conservative, mystical, ethical, metaphysical, idealistic, religious, spiritual, philosophical, pacifist, messianic, even saintly. Dorothy Thompson called Toller humanitarian, even Shelleyan, and some such adjective would have done much to emphasize Toller's highly introspective and conscientiolls nature and character as - in Theodor Reuss's phrase - "basically a delicate enthusiast." EVA LACHMAN-KALITZKI, UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI BETTINA L. KNAPP. Theatre andAlchemy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1980. pp. xiii, 283. Bettina Knapp, who in previous books dealing with Artaud, Genet, Racine, and others has shown her mastery of Jungian archetypal criticism, now joins to this already academically sanctioned approach to literature the less conventional methodology of alchemy, which has yet to become a standard analytic tool in the study of drama or the other arts, although there are recent signs of growing interest and acceptance. I In the introduction to Theatre and Alchemy, Knapp gives a brief history of alchemy as a science, psychology, and metaphysics, and investigates its applications to the theatre, drawing upon seminal insights by Jung and, above all, by Antonin Anaud, the spiritual father of the alchemical interpretation of theatrical texts. We learn from this lucid and erudite exposition that the three-part alchemical process - Nigredo (blackening procedure), Albedo (whitening stage), and Rubedo (reddening phase) - corresponds to the different psychological moments in the development of the human personality according to Jung, and becomes, as a mode of analysis, a metaphor for the act of creation. In similar fashion, the seven alchemical operations - Calcinario, Solutio, Coagulatio, Sublimatio, Separatio, PutrefactiolMortificatio, Coniunctio - which collectively result in the fonnation of perfect metal, may also be viewed as psychological operations producing sound personality and enabling the individual to transfonn chaos into cosmos. The rest of Theatre andAlchemy consists ofa series ofchapters in which single plays Book Reviews 573 by Slrindberg, Ghelderode, Claudel, Witkiewicz, Yeats, Villiers de I'Isle-Adam, and Ansky. plus the Noh drama, Matsukaze. and Kalidasa's Shakuntala, are scrutinized in depth according to the alchemical teoria. The neat and admittedly schematic plan whereby the plays are assigned to different stages of the alchemical process (with the exception of the two Oriental dramas, which are considered as Spiritus Mundi! Anima Mundi) is largely an organizational device, since each of the works transcends any given category. although it may instructively be seen as guided by a dominant operation. In Knapp's expert hands the alchemical method is revealed to be an effective synthesis of occult arts and esoteric disciplines that can serve as the basis for learned explications of the symbolism of colors, names, animals, elements, and precious stones. Instead of forcing each play into a fixed pseudoscientific mold (a real danger when there is such wholesale borrowing of tenninology from another, more technical and speculative sphere of knowledge), Knapp discusses particular dramatic works on their own terms, using alchemy less as a precise technique than as a mode of perceiving hidden dimensions and...

Decadence in Villiers de I'Isle‐Adam and His Followers

Continental Decadence not only had an identifiable international literary rhetoric. Its rhetoric, without being self‐reflective or self‐referential, was its raison d'être also. A quintessential example is “Conte d'Amour” from Contes cruds by Villiers de l'Isle‐Adam (1838–89). Here rhetorical excess, both as redundancy and crypticism, conveys the typical Decadent gestus: morbid, gross and over‐refined, solipsistic. Such a rhetoric must be the medium for the label Decadent to be completely justified. As we follow the wake of Villiers' influence first outside French with Arthur Symons and Stefan George and next outside France (but in French) with Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Van Lerberghe, and Georges Rodenbach, we find that each admirer selects features which reinforce his own bent. Symons follows Villiers most closely, using language to disguise and divert reality. George uses language to intensify reality. Maeterlinck, Van Lerberghe, and Rodenbach use language to reinterpret reality and, especially in the case of Rodenbach, to discredit rhetoric when divorced from reality. By the end of the 19th century, in prose the Naturalist verso of Decadence has pierced through the face; in poetry Decadence has modulated into Symbolism. But the full expression, found in Villiers, seems historically to have been necessary. There had to be cryptic statement and overstatement before there could be enduring statement.

Discovering Neruda: An Interview with H. R. Hays

, Octavio Paz, literatura y literalidad, in Traduccion: Iiteratura y literalidad (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1971), pp. 7-21. An English translation of this essay (Translation: Literature and Literality) by Lynn Tuttle appeared in Translation Review, No.3 (1979), pp. 13·19. 2George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) and Serge Gavronsky, Translator: From Piety to Cannibalism, Sub-Stance, No. 16 (1977), pp. 53-62. 3Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote, trans. James E. Irby in Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1975), pp.36-44. 4Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Entropy and Redundancy in Decadent Style: Villiers de L'lsle-Adam, Sub·Stance, No. 16 (1977), pp. 144-148. 5John Felstiner, Translating Pablo Neruda's 'Galope m uerto, PMLA, 93, 2 (March 1978), 185-195. 6Rainer Schulte, Act of Translation: From Interpretation to Interdisciplinary Thinking, Translation Review, NO.4 (1979), pp. 3-8. Schulte's suggestions for translation as re-vitalized critical reading complement very well Roger Shattuck's recent call for a reexamination of the relations between criticism and its host, literature. See How to Rescue The New YorkReview of Books, (17 April 1980), pp. 29-35. 70ctavio Armand, Piet menos mia, Special number of magazine Escolios (Los Angeles: California State University, 1976), p. 9. BRamon del Valle-lnclan, La lampara maravillosa (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1948), pp. 129-30. 9Ernst Robert Curtius, European Uterature and Latin Middle Ages, trans. Williard Trask (1953; rpt, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 345-346 and Carol Maier, Concept of Language in La lampara maravillosa, in Waiting for Pegasus. Studies of Presence of Symbolism and Decadence in Hispanic Letters, ed. Roland Grass and William R. Risley (Macomb, Illinois: Essays in Literature, 1979), pp. 77-87.

The Poet and the Prime Minister: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and the Marquess of Salisbury

The Poet and the Prime Minister: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and the Marquess of Salisbury

ABSTRACTS

Akira Arai. “Milton and Thomas Young.”(Rev.) C. M. George. “The Wolf Image in Milton.”David B. Morris. “Drama and stasis in Milton's ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity.”Michael West. “The Consolatio in Milton's Funeral Elegies.”Christopher Grose. “Lucky Words: Process of Speech in Lycidas.”Catherine M. Shaw. “The Unity of Comus.” Xavier University StudiesPurvis E. Boyette. “Milton's Abstracted Sublimities: The Structure of Meaning in A Mask.”Robert A. Stein. “The Sources and Implications of the Jobean Analogies in Paradise Regained.”Donald L. Guss. “A Rrief Epic: Paradise Regained.”Albert C. Labriola. “Divine Urgency as a Motive for Conduct in Samson Agonistes.”Anthony Low. “No Power but of God:” Vengeance and Justice in Samson Agonistes.”Anthony Low. “The Astronomy of Paradise Lost.”Y. Z. Chang. “Why did Milton Err on Two Chinas?”Marilyn Gaddis Rose. “Milton, Chateaubriand, and Villiers de L'Isle‐Adam. Paradise Lost and Axel.”

Strindberg And The Symbolist Drama

THE EFFORT of the symbolist poets and dramatists of the 1890's to create a drama in accord with their poetics of suggestiveness, mystery, and occult correspondences, was a major impulse shaping the development of the modem theater. While the leading symbolist playwrights were French and Belgian writers who had come under the direct influence of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Mallarme, the new movement rapidly spread throughout Europe, affecting the work of dramatists who were not symbolists in any strict sense, but who responded to the new emphasis on dream, magic, and atmospheric evocation perhaps best exemplified in the early plays of Maeterlinck. Such varied writers as Hofmannsthal, Hauptmann, Yeats, and Strindberg drew upon the experiments and innovations of the symbolists and. contributed to their effort to bring about a theater of fantasy, musicality, and poetry.

A Revaluation of Axel

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was said to have lived on terms of dangerous intimacy with the dream. His almost pathological fear of too-close association with his contemporaries made for an unhealthy state in his personal life. He lived apart from his fellow men in the manner of a recluse. The symptoms of this are everywhere evident in his last work, published posthumously in 1890, Axel. It is perhaps time for a reappraisal of that complicated drama which Edmund Wilson introduced to the American reader in his Axel's Castle (1931). Wilson's comments about the play were limited to certain belle-Iettristic remarks to give his thorough study of Symbolism a convenient fulcrum. In his final chapter he proceeded to contrast the Axel of Villiers de l1sle-Adam's play with the poet Rimbaud. Each was intended to represent an approach of the "Symbolist" man: Axel, the renunciation of life through suicide; Rimbaud, the rejection of art and the search for a new medium.

A Revaluation of Axel

A REVALUATION OF AXEL Vn.LIERS DE L1SLE-ADAM was said to have lived on terms of dangerous intimacy with the dream. His almost pathological fear of too-close association with his contemporaries made for an unhealthy state in his personal life. He lived apart from his fellow men in the manner of a recluse. The symptoms of this are everywhere evident in his last work, published posthumously in 1890, Axel. It is perhaps time for a reappraisal of that complicated drama which Edmund Wilson introduced to the American reader in his Axel's Castle (1931). Wilson's comments about the play were limited to certain belle-Iettristic remarks to give his thorough study of Symbolism a convenient fulcrum. In his final chapter he proceeded to contrast the Axel of Villiers de l1sle-Adam's play with the poet Rimbaud. Each was intended to represent an approach of the "Symbolist" man: Axel, the renunciation of life through suicide; Rimbaud, the rejection of art and the search for a new medium. Before Wilson's book, Axel had received little attention. The play was published by the Maison Quantin in Paris one year after its author's death. It was received ungratefully by a generation which was doubtless unprepared for it. Even the "abuses" multiplied by the Symbolist poets of the 1880's rarely went to the lengths suggested by Villiers' play. There were those who turned to Axel as a kind of liturgy of Symbolism, an almost sacred work, like W. B. Yeats and Mallarme. They found the possibility of performing it heretical; they forced it into the category of the closet drama. When it was finally put on at the Theatre de la Gaite lyrique, in Paris, it survived two performances (February 26 and 27, 1894). The reviews were consistently unfavorable. Both Lemaitre of Debats and Sarcey of the Temps, the most distinguished drama critics of the period, took violent exception to this "art nouveau" which Axel seemed to represent. It was agreed that the mere presence of dialogue did not make a literary work acceptable theater. The almost total absence of dramatic action, the over-sustained lyrical outpourings horrified drama critics who still believed that the "unities" carried conviction. (The problem will recur some years later when the first attempts were made to produce Paul Claudel. Only recently has the Comedie fran~aise admitted him to its repertoire by performing such plays as Le Soulier de satin, L'Annonce faite aMarie, and L'Otage.) It is difficult to know how Villiers himseH felt about his play. The presence of detailed, often excessively involved, stage directions would seem to indicate that he intended it eventually for the stage. One French critic (E. Drougard) writing about Axel remarked: "One can 236 1959 A REVALUATION OF Axel 237 state with conviction that it consumed the entire life of the author; he never stopped thinking about it, working on it; and finally only decided to publish it, so it seems, under the pressure of necessity. . . ." Axel then becomes Villiers' Faust. Thematically the two works beg comparison . Neither the second part of Goethe's work nor Axel is especially stageworthy, though each aspires to be dramatic. It is clear that Villiers had at least the Faust legend in mind when he wrote his own play. He probably knew Goethe's Faust in Nerval's translation which appeared in 1828; he perhaps also was familiar with Berlioz' Damnation of Faust which was popular with the Symbolists at the end of the 19th century. Axel, in an important sense, is the literary application of the formula for the synthesis of the arts set down in Wagner's treatise Opera and Drama. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was another in the long succession of Symbolist writers who turned to the German composer for inspiration. He shared the opinion of his contemporaries who fashioned an ideal Wagner-making him over into a literary figure who had inadvertently wandered into music. Turning to Axel, one is struck by a series of "fin de siecle" effects which have been forced into a form casually resembling a play. It is divided into four sections each of which is referred to as...

THE LAST DAYS OF VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

THE LAST DAYS OF VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM Get access ALAN W. RAITT ALAN W. RAITT OXFORD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 3, July 1954, Pages 233–249, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/VIII.3.233 Published: 01 July 1954

Mallarmé's Island Voyage

Previous articleNext article No AccessMallarmé's Island VoyageWallace FowlieWallace Fowlie Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 47, Number 3Feb., 1950 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/388839 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Notes on the Redon Article

Abstract1. Since this article was written a book has appeared which traces the continuity of the Symbolist movement from Mallarmé and de Nerval to Yeats, Valéry, Proust, T. S. Eliot. James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. (Scribners). The author is Edmund Wilson. The title, Axel's Castle, refers, of course, to the “Wagnerian, Romantic-Gothic” haunt of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's incredible hero.