/lit/ - Literature

> Villiers' aunt died in 1871, ending his financial support. 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. His poverty only increased his sense of aristocratic pride.