Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  The cobbles were covered in thick ice, and the iron banisters were loose in several places. At the bottom of the staircase I witnessed a grim scene. A man’s body was stretched out in the alley, his head resting on the last step, and his feet sticking into the gutter of a sewage pipe that came out of the alley-wall beneath the iron landing. They had just cut him down from the bars of a low window, in the cellar-wall above the bottom steps, from which he had hanged himself … The man in black turned out to be the commissioner of police.

  (water, echoing footsteps and voices, the slap of wet clothes on marble …)

  MORTUARY Slab number 14. Twenty-sixth January 1855.

  ASSISTANT Reception time: nine-thirty a.m. Sex: masculine. Age: forty-seven. Place of birth: Paris, Seine. Civil status: bachelor. Clothes and possessions: one black jacket; two calico shirts; two flannel waistcoats; one pair pale-grey trousers; one pair patent-leather shoes; one pair socks – red cotton (fade) …

  (fade in radiophonic music)

  POLICE

  COMMISSIONER Labrunie, Gérard. Also known as Gérard de Nerval, man of letters. Temporary address at the Hotel de Normandie, 13 rue des Bons-Enfants. A case of suicide by strangulation. This morning at approximately seven-thirty a.m. the deceased was found hanging from the bars of a locksmith’s shop in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. He had hanged himself with a length of sash-cord; the body was attached to the bars by means of the said cord. There were no signs of violence on the corpse.

  MAXIME DU CAMP Very early on Friday morning I received a message from Théophile Gautier informing me that Gérard de Nerval had been found hung … They’d sent for Gautier and Arsène Houssaye to confirm the identification. Gautier was apparently moved to tears; he had a long-standing affection for Gérard. It was easy for me to see the body in the mortuary. Poor Gérard was laid out flat on his back, his eyes shut, and his tongue just slightly protruding between parted lips. His fingers were clenched inwards on his palms, but his face was calm. His head was fractionally twisted on to his left shoulder-blade, and the tips of his feet were turned abnormally outwards. There was no trace of violence, no bruising, no contusions. Only, around the neck, there ran a thin line – more brown, as I remember, than red – which bore witness to the pressure of the cord, that piece of kitchen-cord which Gérard had shown me but six days previously – and which in his madness, he took for a seventeenth-century ladies’ dress-cord, no less than the actual dress-cord of Madame de Maintenon!

  (tolling bell effect: radiophonics)

  HOLMES Gérard’s funeral took place on the 30th January, and a mass was said for him in a side chapel of Notre Dame. In order to obtain permission for him to be buried in consecrated ground at Père Lachaise cemetery, a special application was made to the Archbishop of Paris. Suicide, when committed while ‘of unsound mind’, does not cut the victim off from the consolations of Mother Church.

  (monks’ choir singing the ‘Dies Irae’ in Gregorian chant. In the background the sound of digging, and wind blowing. Over this the scrape of a quill pen on paper and the voice of …)

  DR EMILE My Lord Bishop: M. Labrunie, Gérard de

  BLANCHE Nerval, was suffering from extreme fits of mental alienation, which seized him on repeated occasions during these last few years, and for which he received treatment from both my father and myself, Dr Emile Blanche, in this institution … Though M. de Nerval was not ill enough to be confined in a mental asylum against his will, yet in my considered opinion his state of mind had not been healthy or normal for a long time previously.

  He believed he had the same powers of imagination, and the same aptitude for work, as he had in the old days, and he expected to support himself as before on the income from his writing. Certainly he worked harder than ever, but one may feel that he was disappointed in his hopes, perhaps. His natural independence and pride of character prevented him from accepting anything in the way of aid, from even his best-tried friends. As a result of these mental – or moral – pressures, his reason was driven further and further astray; and above all this was because he now saw his madness face to face. I therefore have no hesitation in declaring, my Lord Bishop, that it was certainly in an extreme fit of madness that M. Gérard de Nerval put an end to his days.

  (gradually fade out sound of the plainchant, the digging, and finally the wind, during the next voice-over. Towards the end, radiophonics reappear)

  MAXIME DU CAMP He was mad, though it was an intermittent kind of madness, which in its moments of calm left him with a personality both gentle and original, and a mode of life that was full of oddities. But when his state became critical, he was a danger both to himself and those around him, and he would be carried off to Passy, to the mental hospital in the old town house of the Duc de Penthièvre, run by Dr Emile Blanche. These fits would either depress him to the point of coma, or else excite him to the pitch of fury; but they rarely endured for more than six months at a time. He would emerge from them slowly, like someone only half-awake and still under the impression of a vivid dream. I often used to go and visit him in the asylum when he was recovering. He said to me on one occasion: It’s so kind of you to come, Du Camp: you know our poor Dr Blanche is mad. He thinks he is running a mental hospital, and we all have to pretend to be mental patients in order to calm him down. I wonder if you could stand in for me a while, because I have to go over to Chantilly tomorrow morning to marry Mme de Feuchères. You will recall that Mme de Feuchères was the mistress of the last prince of the house of Condé, who hanged himself from a window with a silk handkerchief.

  (music starts faintly)

  HOLMES The poet who called himself Gérard de Nerval spent many years recording his dreams and hallucinations. The analysis of memory became the central preoccupation of his life. ‘Angelique’, ‘Sylvie’, ‘Pandora’, ‘Aurélia’ – these are the names of the works by which he sought to justify his existence; and perhaps to explain his death. They are works which he regarded as both literary and to some degree scientific; as human evidence. But was he, in fact, mad?

  (the radiophonic music increases in volume, until rising through it comes the voice of …)

  NERVAL Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate those Gates of Ivory, or of Horn, that separate us from the invisible world, without shuddering. The first moments of sleep are the very image of death; a dark haze of drowsiness invades our thoughts, and we can never determine the precise instant when the self, in its other form, takes over the work of existence. A vague subterranean region slowly brightens out beneath us, and from the shadows of the night emerge those pale figures, gravely unmoving, that populate the worlds of limbo. Then the picture takes shape, and a new light begins to glow upon and animate the strange apparitions – and the world of the Spirits opens before us. I am going to try to set down the impressions produced by a long malady, which took place entirely within the mysteries of my spirit – and I do not know why I employ the term ‘malady’, for never, as far as my inward self was concerned, did I feel myself to be in a healthier state. Sometimes I believed that my physical strength and mental powers were doubled; it seemed as if I knew everything, understood everything; my imagination brought me infinite delights. In recovering what men have chosen to call my reason, should I regret having lost such things?

  HOLMES Théophile Gautier and the other poets who were his friends did not find it difficult to accept Nerval’s madness as a form of visionary power superior to mere reason.

  GAUTIER I had known Gérard since my college days. He was a small, dreamy figure with a neat brown beard cut in the German manner and large grey eyes. There was something boyish about this round, full face, and his mischievous conversation. He had a peculiar walk: his elbows flapped at his sides, and in his short Austrian cloak he looked a little like an ostrich trying to take off from the boulevard, as if he would like to flap away over the heads of the crowd, over the carriage roofs, over the chestnut trees, over the balconies and sloping rooftops, and disappear into the Parisia
n sky.

  I well remember him standing one day in front of the great marble fireplace in Victor Hugo’s drawing-room, and holding forth on his favourite subject, which involved whirling together the Heavens and Hells of several different world religions with such studious impartiality that someone suddenly exclaimed: ‘But Gérard! It’s perfectly plain that you don’t believe in any religion at all, really!’

  (Gautier chuckles to himself, remembering)

  Well Gérard simply transfixed the chap with those glittering grey eyes of his, all those weird scintillations, and announced with immense deliberation: ‘No religion at all? I have no religion? – I tell you I have seventeen religions – seventeen at least.’ Well you can imagine that brought the conversation to a pretty close!

  (Gautier goes on chuckling, and suddenly mutters …)

  HOLMES In his twenties, Gérard developed a mysterious passion for a blonde singer in the Opera-Comique, Jenny Colon. He bought a huge fourposter bed, carved with zodiac-signs, in which to consummate the affair; but Gautier, who knew about such things, said that Gérard was disappointed in his hopes. He travelled abroad, to Naples, to Brussels and Vienna, trying to forget her. By the spring of 1841 he returned to Paris for the carnival season, and took lodgings near Gautier again, in the cheerful quartier of small streets, cafés, flea-markets and fish shops, north of the boulevard Montmartre. It was the haunt of young painters, journalists and actresses, and during Mardi Gras the revels lasted all night long. The streets filled with decorated carriages, crowds of revellers in grotesque masks and provocative fancy-dress, the sound of music and dancing and fireworks. Gérard drank in the café Pelletier with his friends, and then wandered off alone through the streets. He was in a strange state, he seemed to fluctuate between exaltation and despair.

  (the carnival music which has continued softly in the background, now increases in volume)

  NERVAL The hour was striking just as I passed the doorway of No. 37 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, and on the doorstep I saw a woman, still quite young, but whose appearance filled me with surprise and horror. Her face was deadly pale, and her eyes were sunken into her skull. I said to myself: ‘This is the figure of Death.’ I went home to bed with the clear idea that the world was soon to end …

  The next evening I returned to my usual café, where I held forth for hours on music and painting, with my various friends. I spun together all the elements of a theoretical system on the affinities of the human races, on the power of numbers, on the harmony of colours. Then midnight struck. For me it signified the fatal hour: though I wondered if the chronometer of the heavens did not perhaps correspond with our earthly clocks. I said to my friend Paul Chenevard, the painter, that I was leaving and setting out for my homeland, in the East. He came with me as far as the crossroads at Cadet. Here, finding myself at the confluence of several streets, I stopped uncertainly, and sat down on a bollard on the corner of the rue Coquenard. Paul used all his force to make me move on, but in vain. I felt nailed to the spot. Finally, at about one in the morning, he abandoned me, and finding myself alone I called out for help to two friends, Théophile Gautier and Alphonse Karr, whom I glimpsed in the crowd passing like shadows. It was a night of carnival, and a mass of carriages packed with people wearing masks were going up and down the street. I examined the carriage numbers with intense curiosity, and became engrossed in a mystical kind of numerical calculation. At last, above the roofs of the rue Hauteville, I saw a red star rising, encircled with a blue, hazy halo. I thought I recognized it as the distant star of Saturn, and getting to my feet with a great effort, I set off in that direction.

  (at this point the carnival music fades rapidly away, and Nerval’s voice begins to speak in a kind of vacuum … radiophonics gradually appearing)

  Then I began to hear some strange and mysterious kind of singing, almost like a hymn, which filled me with wild joy. At the same time I began to take off my terrestrial garments, and fling them in a circle around me. When I got to the middle of the street, I found that I was suddenly surrounded by a night-patrol of soldiers. I realized that I had been endowed with superhuman physical force, and it seemed as if I only had to stretch out my hands in order to lay all the poor soldiers flat on the pavement, as one might smooth the fur of a fleece. But I did not want to deploy this magnetic force, and I allowed myself to be taken without resistance to the police-post in the Place Cadet.

  They put me on a camp-bed, while my clothes were hung in front of the stove to dry. Then I had a vision. The sky opened before my eyes in a blaze of light, and the divinities of antiquity appeared in front of me. But the morning put an end to this dream. A change of guard replaced the soldiers who had brought me in, and they put me in the lock-up cells with a strange individual, arrested the same night as myself, who did not seem to know even his own name.

  Then my friends came to collect me, and later they put me in a carriage and we found ourselves at the rue Picpus. They had brought me to a hospital …

  (radiophonic music)

  For three days I fell into a profound sleep, rarely interrupted by dreams. A woman dressed in black appeared at the foot of my bed and it seemed to me that her eyes were sunken in her skull. Only, at the bottom of their empty sockets, it seemed as if I could see tears welling slowly up, glistening like diamonds. To me, it seemed that this woman was the ghost of my mother, who had died long ago in Silesia.

  HOLMES Nerval was collected from the police-cells at the Place Cadet by Gautier and Alphonse Karr, who took him home to the rue Navarin. They were not entirely surprised. Gérard had once been arrested before, at the age of twenty-three, for street disturbance; and one summer in Belgium with Gautier he had behaved strangely, staring at the girls in the cafés, and walking around, in Gautier’s benign phrase, ‘in a state of alarming erection’, being turned out ‘because of his priapism’. But Nerval was now violent, a chair and a mirror were smashed, and the next evening Gautier took him in a carriage to the rue Picpus, where he remained for three weeks. He was discharged in March 1841, but shortly after had a relapse, and was taken to the celebrated asylum, then in Montmartre, run by Dr Esprit Blanche, the father of Émile. Gérard remained a patient there for eight months. He was visited constantly by his friends, Gautier, Alphonse Karr, Arsène Houssaye.

  NERVAL They will tell you that I have recovered what is conveniently called my ‘reason’, but don’t believe a word of it. I am, and I have always been, the same, and the only thing that surprises me is that people found me changed for a few days last spring.

  What really happened was that I had a fascinating dream, and that I now regret its passing. I even sometimes ask myself if the dream was not more strictly truthful then, than the natural explanation of those events today. But as there are doctors here, and officials, who guard against any extension of the field of poetry on to the public highway, I have not been definitely discharged and allowed out to roam among reasonable people until I have admitted, officially and formally, that I have indeed been ill: something which cost a lot both of my sense of self-respect and my sense of veracity. Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they did in the old days with witches and heretics. And finally, to put an end to it all, I agreed to it, and let myself be categorized under the heading of an ailment which is variously defined and entitled by the doctors and by the Dictionary of Medicine, as ‘Theomania’ or indeed ‘Demono-mania’. With the aid of these two terms, medical science appears to have the right to abolish or reduce to silence all the prophets and seers predicted by the Apocalypse, among whom I flatter myself to be! But I am resigned to my fate, and if I do not achieve my predestiny, I shall accuse Dr Blanche of having subtly suppressed the Holy Ghost. I am fine now, my dear Janin, but for seven months, thanks to your pretended obituary of me in the ‘Debats’ on 1st March, I have passed for a lunatic. My complaint is just. Though I am always grateful for your help, I am no less affected by having to pass for a sublime lunatic, thanks to you, to Théophile Gautier, to Lucas, and so on. I shall
never be able to go into society anywhere … I shall never be able to marry, I shall never get myself a serious hearing … nearly all my literary friends have followed your example, and agreed to make of me some sort of prophet, a visionary, whose reason was lost in Germany in the course of initiations to secret societies, and study of oriental symbolism. ‘What a shame!’ they all say, ‘France has lost a genius who could have done her honour … Only his friends really knew him!’ With the result, my dear Janin, that I am the living tomb of Gérard de Nerval whom you once loved, helped and encouraged.

  (change to music with Arab flavour)

  Perhaps I can escape the cold indifference of Paris by following the Eastern Star that leads me to my destiny.

  GAUTIER How much I wished, my dear Gérard, that I could have come and joined you at Cairo, as I had originally promised. Not that you will find this difficult to believe: I should far rather wander with you along the banks of the Nile, or hold long discussions in the gardens of Schoubrah, or climb the mountain of Mokattan to admire the beautiful view, than to polish my boot-soles on the various grades of asphalt and bitumen that stretch between the rue Navarin and the rue du Mont-Blanc. But who is the man who can do what he likes, except you perhaps? Like another Don César de Bazan, you see before you a host of yellow women, and black women, and blue women, and probably green women; you see the wild ibis, and the rats of the Pharaohs’ tombs. You are fortunate indeed! While I have not even been able to leave Paris: there is always some invisible thread to pull me back to the ground just at the moment when I am about to take flight; without mentioning the wretched newspaper column …