Consequently, Marquis Joseph-Toussaint spent large sums of money buying and excavating land before selling unsuccessful sites at a loss.

The young Villiers' education was troubled—he attended over half a dozen different schools—yet from an early age his family were convinced he was an artistic genius, and as a child, he composed poetry and music.

He frequented the Brasserie des Martyrs, where he met his idol Baudelaire, who encouraged him to read the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe and Baudelaire would become the biggest influences on Villiers' mature style; his first publication, however (at his own expense), was a book of verse, Premières Poésies (1859).

At first, he was impressed by the patriotic spirit of the Commune and wrote articles in support of it in the Tribun du peuple under the pseudonym "Marius", but he soon became disillusioned with its revolutionary violence.

Though Villiers had many admirers in literary circles (the most important being his close friend Stéphane Mallarmé), mainstream newspapers found his fiction too eccentric to be saleable, and few theatres would run his plays.

Villiers was forced to take odd jobs to support his family: he gave boxing lessons and worked in a funeral parlour and was employed as an assistant to a mountebank.

Another money-making scheme Villiers considered was reciting his poetry to a paying public in a cage full of tigers, but he never acted on the idea.

According to his friend Léon Bloy, Villiers was so poor he had to write most of his novel L'Ève future lying on his belly on bare floorboards, because the bailiffs had taken all his furniture.

He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, though a planned tomb monument designed by Frédéric Brou was abandoned at the maquette stage.

The work is heavily influenced by the Romantic theatre of Victor Hugo, as well as Goethe's Faust and the music dramas of Richard Wagner.