By conventional standards Jean-Marie Mathias Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was an utter failure as a dramatist in his lifetime. His first plays were issued in editions so small in number that almost no one knew they existed. Of the three plays staged before his death, two were complete flops; the third, a minor work, is memorable only for having been performed at André Antoine's innovative Théâtre-Libre. Morgane (1866), one of Villiers's first plays, has never been performed at all; he produced a splendid revision of it called Le Prétendant (The Pretender), which was not staged until 1965, and then only on French television. The story of Villiers's tragicomic relationship to the world of the theater is a tale of gigantic ambition and repeated, bitter frustration. But despite all the disappointments he suffered, Villiers did have one great moment in the theater; it...