Brian Stableford

The Miller of Carnac Brian Stableford

This is the first of three volumes of translations of Antoine-Louis Duclaux, Comte de L'Estoille (1835-1894). This book collects his earlier works, including the Breton fantasy The Miller of Carnac (1866), as well as a suite of Arabian Tales (1865), the prose poems of Symphony (1867), the defiantly experimental Fusains (1868), and the epic drama Vercingerorix (1868).

A few modern critics have allotted L'Estoille a significant role in the development of the prose poem, between Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit and Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris, but have often neglected his significant contribution to the development of French fantasy.


His works are especially important in mapping the gradual elaboration and transfiguration of the idea of fées from being seemingly human enchantresses to immaterial beings of symbolic significance. A genuinely innovative writer, L'Estoille was a precursor of the experimentation subsequently carried out by writers of the Symbolist Movement of the 1890s. His contribution to French fantasy has been drastically underestimated, and he was almost forgotten until his recent rediscovery.