Axël Reading Order

Axël (1890, published posthumously 1890, staged 1894) by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is the masterpiece of French Symbolist drama, a verse play in four acts that distills the entire Symbolist worldview into a single statement: the world is unworthy of the ideal, reality is inferior to the imagination of it, and the only authentic response to the gap between the ideal and the real is death. Axël von Auersperg, a Rosicrucian hermit in his Schwarzwald castle, encounters Sara de Maupers, a convent-educated young woman who has come to steal the treasure buried beneath his castle. Their recognition of each other as spiritual equals is immediate and overwhelming, but Axël refuses to reduce the infinite promise of their meeting to the finite experience of living it out: 'Live? Our servants will do that for us' is the most celebrated line in Symbolist literature, and the play ends with Axël and Sara drinking poison together rather than allow reality to disappoint the absolute ideal of their union. Villiers worked on the play for twenty years (he died the year before its publication) and it was recognized immediately as a synthesis of the entire movement: Edmund Wilson's 1931 study Axel's Castle takes its title from the play and argues that Symbolism as a whole is organized around the same choice between the ideal and the real that Axël embodies. The influence of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is explicit and acknowledged.