Darkness permeates Villiers d'Isle-Adam's L’Ève future, even if this darkness is sometimes flecked with light. In the epigraph introducing the first chapter of the novel, one reads a citation from Gilles Fletcher: “Les iris et les rondes étincelles de rosée, / Qui pendaient à leurs feuilles azurées, apparaissaient / Comme des étoiles clignotantes qui pétillent dans le bleu du soir” (39; emphasis original). In the last passage in the novel, the main character “écouta … l'indifférent vent de l'hiver qui entrechoquait les branches noires, – puis son regard s’étant levé … vers les vieilles sphères lumineuses qui brûlaient, impassibles, entre les lourds nuages et sillonnaient, à l'infini, l'inconcevable mystère des cieux” (349). What appears to dominate here is the brightness of the stars but, in fact, their light, or rather humanity's ability to perceive it, is due to the somber background of the night. Darkness thus constitutes the frame within which light is perceived and, more broadly, the perspective within which the narrative unfolds.

The novel begins at night in Menlo Park, “une habitation qu'entouraient de profonds jardins solitaires” (39), and darkness accompanies every important development in the text. For instance, to discover the Ideal Woman (Hadaly), one must first descend into a deep, dark cavern, “le royaume de taupes” (163), where the only light possible is artificial. Once illuminated, what stands out is the design on the ceiling: “l'image du Ciel tel qu'il apparaît, noir et sombre, au-delà de toute atmosphère planétaire” (166). At the center of this sky is “un astre,” but once again it is only visible because of what lies behind it.

Lord Ewald and Hadaly, the android Edison created for him, begin to become lovers during a starry but deeply shadowed night: “le ciel est redevenu clair,” but “l'ombre s'approfondissait et devenait sublime” (305). Because Lord Ewald believes that he is not with Hadaly but a real woman, he is suddenly happy to think he is in the company of Alicia Clary, and thus begins to find something repellent in the idea of the “Ideal Woman” which Edison has created for him: “le noir prodige de l'Andréide traversa ses pensées” (305).