He died assassinated on the road to Lyon in 1673 at the hands of one of his cousins, Pierre de Terroüil, caught up in the family vendetta whose gear had led him to leave Languedoc.
Montfaucon de Villars is especially famous for his work The Count of Gabalis, or Interviews on the Secret Sciences (1670) where he gives a tasty parody of magic, astrology, alchemy, divination and what he calls "the Holy Cabal", which is none other than the doctrine of Paracelsus on elementary spirits, so called because they populate the four elements: "The air is full of an innumerable multitude of peoples [the sylphs] of human figure, a little proud in appearance, but docile indeed: great lovers of science, subtle, unofficial to the wise, and enemies of the fools and the ignorant their wives and their daughters are male beauties, such as one depicts the Amazons … Know that the seas and the rivers are inhabited as well as the air* the ancient Sages named this species of people waving or nymphs … The earth is filled almost to the center of gnomes, people of small stature, guardians of treasures, mines and precious stones… As for Salamanders, flaming inhabitants of the region of fire, they serve philosophers ..."(p. 169–171).
are here related to the harmless action of sylphs, gnomes, nymphs or salamanders, and the book hammers down the idea that the Devil has no power in this world.
This book, written in a clear and removed style, full of irony and charm in its form of half-philosophical half-burlesque dialogues, met with real bookstore success.
Its influence was lastingly exercised in literature, and it is clearly one of the springs of the discredit of magic, astrology and alchemy in France at the end of the 17th Century.