Take one inventive genius indebted to the friend who saved his life; add an English aristocrat hopelessly consumed with a selfish and spiritually bankrupt woman; stir together with a Faustian pact to create the perfect woman-and voil! "Tomorrow's Eve" is served. Robert Martin Adams's graceful translation is the first to bring to English readers this captivating fable of a Thomas Edison-like inventor and his creation, the radiant and tragic android Hadaly. Adams's introduction sketches the uncompromising idealism of the proud but penurious aristocrat Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste, Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a friend and admired colleague of Charles Baudelaire, Stphane Mallarm, and Richard Wagner.Villiers dazzles us with a gallery of electronic wonders while unsettling us with the implications of his (and our) increasingly mechanized and mechanical society. A witty and acerbic tale in which human nature, spiritual values, and scientific possibilities collide, "Tomorrow's Eve" retains an enduring freshness and edge.

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Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam(7 November 1838–19 August 1889) was a French symbolist writer.

Villiers' works, in the romantic style, are often fantastic in plot and filled with mystery and horror. Important among them are the drama Axel (1890), the novel L'Ève future ("Tomorrow's Eve") (1886), and the short-story collection, Contes cruels (1883, tr. Sardonic Tales, 1927). Contes cruels is regarded as an important collection of horror stories. [3] L'Ève future greatly helped to popularize the term "Android" (Androïde in French, the character is named "Andréide").