NERVAL Oh my old friend! how well the two of us seem to illustrate that nursery fable of those two men, one who went out to pursue his fortune in life, and the other who waited for it in his bed at home. Though it is not my fortune that I pursue: it is the ideal itself, colour, poetry, love perhaps; and all this comes to you, who remain where you are, and escapes from me, who pursues it … To me, it seems that I have already lost, kingdom by kingdom, province by province, the most beautiful half of the universe, and soon I shall not know where to find a refuge for my dreams. But it is Egypt that I most regret, having hunted it out of my imagination, only to find a sad lodging for it in my memories!
You still believe in the magic ibis, in the purple lotus flower, in the yellow Nile; you believe in the emerald palm tree, the nopal-bush, and even perhaps the camel … alas! the poor ibis is nothing but a wild bird, the lotus is a vulgar onion plant; the Nile is a dull red river with slate-grey reflections, the palm tree is like a moth-eaten hat feather, the nopal-bush is merely a cactus, the camel only exists as a dromedary, the alma dancing girls are actually men, and as for the women, well, you are fortunate never to have set eyes on them! No, I shall think no more of Cairo, the city of the Thousand and One Nights …
To sum it up, the East cannot compare with that waking dream which I went through two years ago in Paris; or rather, the Orient of that dream is more distant still, or higher perhaps. I have had enough of running after poetry: I now believe that you can find it on your own doorstep, and perhaps in your own bed. As yet I am still the man who runs after it, but I am going to try and stop myself, and wait.
(the noise of Gérard’s ship splashing through the waters of the Mediterranean continues for some moments, until it becomes faintly menacing. However, it fades gradually and gives way once more to the busy, Parisian music of Offenbach and this merges into radiophonics …)
HOLMES Nerval returned to Paris in January 1844, his thinning hair bleached from the desert sun, and his grey eyes seeming even paler and larger in his tanned face. His legend had grown in his absence, and he was now something of a celebrity. Besides being wined and dined by Gautier, he had his mystical sonnets ‘Christ in the Garden of Olives’ published in the Artiste by Balzac, and he began to be cultivated by the younger generation of poets such as Charles Baudelaire. Yet he still seemed restless, and he was the foremost among the group of painters and poets who went to the Hotel Pimodan on the Île Saint-Louis to smoke hashish, as his friend Alphonse Karr remembered.
(the sound of the music begins to echo unnaturally, and distort, and fill with strange sounds of breathing and laughter …)
ALFHöNSE KARR There were only a few of us, half a dozen at most I remember, among them Gérard, Théophile Gautier, and an extremely amusing fellow, Boissard, a painter … the luncheon was animated, and we took the drugs towards the end, infused in hot water like tea. During the meal I noticed that the doorbell rang constantly, which aroused my suspicions, and these were confirmed when we adjourned from the dining-room to the salon, an immense chamber with carved panelling, wall-mirrors, and nude goddesses painted on the ceiling. A dozen spectators were already assembled there, among them Esquirol, the famous specialist in mental diseases, and I realized we were to be put on exhibition … The influence of the hashish soon began to manifest itself: one young man leapt on to a table and began a long lecture which was complete nonsense. Boissard burst into tears and began to moan, ‘Don’t bother me, don’t bother me, I am so happy!’ Gautier put his head under some cushions and tried helplessly to stifle a mad outburst of laughter; and Gérard, with his same dreamy smile, began to sing ballads and songs, improvising the words … I heard Dr Esquirol whispering in a low voice: ‘It’s obvious that frequent use of this substance would endanger a man’s reason …’
I am told that the painter Boissard subsequently fulfilled Esquirol’s melancholy prediction. He became addicted to both hashish and opium, and died young, his health broken and his mind clouded. As for Gérard, I was frightened at the time that he might abandon himself to opium. He already liked wine, literary wines he used to say, meaning the wines celebrated by poets, the wines of Syracuse, the Rhine valley, Falerna, and so on. Certainly he smoked a lot, though I never saw him completely drugged.
GAUTIER Gérard’s peculiarities became increasingly exaggerated, and sometimes it was difficult to explain them away, for they moved from the purely intellectual into the physical realm. To Gérard’s indignation, this made some kind of enlightened medical treatment a growing necessity. He could not conceive why doctors should be worried if, for example, he chose to walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal leading a live lobster along on the end of a blue silk ribbon. ‘Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?’ he used to ask, ‘or for that matter, a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a stroll? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea. They don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn’t mad.’ There were a thousand other reasons, each more ingenuous than the last. (Gautier sighs)
NERVAL Dreams and madness. The red star. The longing for the Orient. Now Europe arises. The dream is realized. Seas. Memories. Confusion … It is men who have made me suffer. A new land where my head can find rest. My love abandoned in a tomb. I fled from her, I lost her, I made her great … Brussels. Escaped from the lead coffin. The new era. The return of the gods.
(sudden percussion arising out of ecstatic music)
My dear Du Camp – something terrible’s happened, not just a delay, but a serious accident, I was nearly killed, I shall probably feel the effects for the rest of my life … Isn’t it a kind of predestination? I was getting on well with the article, nearly half the sheets done, I would have completed it by tomorrow at latest. Then yesterday I went to dine with a friend at Montmartre, someone Théophile knows. While descending one of the terraces, I tripped and fell down a staircase, my chest struck an angle of the ironwork and my right knee buckled up under my whole weight. The worst is the chest, this morning I have a huge blue contusion … my knee hurt so much I couldn’t sleep at all last night. Can we put off the article until next month? … I am so feverish … warn Théophile and Houssaye … Your devoted Gérard de Nerval.
(return of visionary music)
NERVAL I was wandering in the countryside at Montmartre, preoccupied with an essay I was writing on various religious ideas … It was sunset, and going down the steps of a rustic staircase, I slipped and my chest struck heavily on the angle of ironwork. I had enough strength to get to my feet and stagger to the middle of the garden, believing I had received a death-blow. Before I died I wanted one last look at the setting sun … However, my collapse was only a fainting-fit, and I managed to get back to my lodgings and go to bed. I became feverish. When I recalled the exact point at which I had fallen, I remembered that I had been admiring a view over the cemetery. It was the very same that contained the tomb of Aurélia.
This fact did not actually occur to me until that moment; otherwise I might have attributed my fall to the feelings excited by such a view. But even this realization gave me the sense of a more absolute, exact predestination. I regretted, even more, that death had not reunited me with her. Then, as I thought this over, I told myself that I was not worthy. I recalled bitterly the life I had led since her death, reproaching myself – not with having forgotten her, for I had never really done so – but with having desecrated her memory with easy love affairs. The idea came to trouble my feverish sleep … I had confused dreams, mixed with scenes of bloodshed.
HOLMES The tomb of Aurelia. The love abandoned in the tomb. Who was Aurelia? After his death, all his friends agreed that it was none other than the pretty, blonde Opéra-Comique singer, Jenny Colon, who had apparently rejected his love and his huge Renaissance fourposter bed, years previously. Jenny had last seen Gérard a few months before his arrest, in Bruss
els. She had died, tragically young, in 1842, shortly before Gérard set out for the East. She had been buried in the cemetery at Montmartre. Jenny and Aurelia had become identified in Gérard’s mind.
A few weeks later in January 1852 Gérard suffered another, more disastrous setback. He had written a play with Joseph Méry.
MERY Our play was chosen to reopen the Porte-Sainte-Martin Theatre, under new management. All our friends said a triumph was assured, but after only a score of performances, the management wrote me a letter to say that receipts were bad, and the play would have to come off. I arranged for Gérard, who had been out buying presents for the cast, to call at my apartment at eleven o’clock on the morning of 23rd January 1852.
It was impossible to keep Marc Fournier’s letter secret. My dear old friend, I said to Gérard with a laugh, do you remember how Victor Hugo’s play Les Burgraves only ran for fifteen nights? It was a lot better than our Imagier … Gérard stared at me: ‘What on earth do you mean?’ ‘I mean one has to be ready for anything,’ I said, ‘even this letter.’ And I passed it over to him. As Gérard read, he lifted both hands to his temples, as if to retain his reason. A burst of nervous laughter twisted his lips, but his eyes were dark and filled with tears. I tried everything I could think of to cheer him up, all the fatuous reasons to excuse our failure, but it was all wasted on him. Gérard was an acutely sensitive person, he couldn’t take it lightly, he couldn’t bounce back …
Finally he said, with another of those bursts of frightful laughter, ‘In fact you are quite right; yes, Les Burgraves was much better than ours – There’s only one play that ever works in Paris, the same play we have all been watching for thirty years, the same play we’ll always watch. The cast consists of a mother and her son. Act One, the son is lost. Act Five, he’s found again. The mother cries, My son! The son cries, My mother! The curtain falls, the audience weeps, the author is inundated with royalties’ … Gérard burst out laughing, weeping, shook my hand, and left.
I followed him out on to the stairs, and asked him to come and see me again very soon. ‘I prefer not to meet you again,’ he said. ‘Whyever not?’ I asked. ‘You tried to console me,’ he said, and disappeared.
When next I saw my poor friend he was in the Maison Dubois, a municipal sanatorium in the faubourg Saint-Denis. He was admitted on that same day, 23rd January 1852, for a period of three weeks. The official diagnosis was feverish hysteria and swelling of the face, believed to be erysipelas.
NERVAL A terrible idea began to dawn upon me. ‘Man is double,’ I told myself. ‘I sense two men within my own breast,’ one Father of the Church has written. The intercourse of two souls, at conception, places this double seed within one body, and offers for inspection two matching parts reproduced within all the organs of its physical structure.
In every man there is both a spectator, and an actor; the one who speaks and the one who answers. The oriental thinkers have seen in this two enemies, naturally opposed: the good and the evil genius.
‘Am I the good, or am I the evil half?’ I asked myself. In any case, the other one must be hostile to me. Who knows if there is not a certain set of circumstances, or a certain time of life, when these two spirits must separate? As both are attached to the same body by physical affinity, perhaps one of them is promised fame and happiness, while the other is destined to annihilation or eternal suffering?
At this point a fatal thought flashed through my dark confusion. Aurélia was no longer mine! I thought I had heard talk of a ceremony that was to take place elsewhere, and preparations for a mystic marriage, which was meant to be mine, but where the other was planning to take advantage and profit from the error of my friends, and of Aurelia herself.
(behind all of Nerval’s speeches that follow, the radiophonic themes continue to play very quietly, in alternation, fading away when other voices speak. The effect is to give Nerval’s account its own continuity, isolated from the outside events described by others)
From that moment that I knew for certain that I had been submitted to the trials of sacred initiation, an invincible force entered into my spirit. I considered myself to be a hero acting beneath the gaze of the gods. Everything in nature took on an entirely new aspect, and secret voices spoke from the plants, the trees, the animals, and the humblest insects, to warn and encourage me. The talk of my companions contained mysterious implications whose sense I understood, and small inanimate objects fitted themselves to the workings of my mind: from chance combinations of pebbles; the shape of cracks, corners and openings; the outline of leaves, from a particular colour, or smell, or sound, I could see harmonies produced that I had never realized existed. I asked myself how I could have lived so long outside nature, and without identifying myself with her? Everything lives, everything moves, everything corresponds. Magnetic impulses emanate from me, and from others, and effortlessly traverse the infinite chain of created being; there is a transparent network that spreads across the whole world, and its extending threads communicate outwards, further and further, from the planets to the stars. Though I am captive at this moment upon earth, I converse with the choirs of stars, and the stars partake of my sorrows and joys!
I went down a dark staircase and found myself in the streets … People were talking of a wedding, and the bridegroom who was due to appear and announce the beginning of the festivities. An insane transport of anger swept over me. I suspected that the person they were waiting for was my double, who was about to marry Aurélia, and I made a violent scene that alarmed the whole assembly. I begged anyone who knew me to come to my aid. One old man said to me: ‘But you must not behave like this, you are frightening everyone.’ I shouted back: ‘I know he has already struck me with his weapons, but I am not afraid, I am waiting for him, and I know the secret sign that will vanquish him.’
At this moment one of the metal workers from the workshop I had visited appeared. He was holding a long bar, the end of which was tipped with a red-hot metal ball. I wanted to throw myself at him, but the ball he was waving in front of him threatened my head. The people around me seemed to mock at my impotence. So I backed away as far as the throne, my soul full of speechless pride, and I raised my arm to make the sign which I thought had magic power. The scream of a woman, clear and penetrating and full of agonizing pain, woke me with a start! The syllables of some unknown word I was about to utter failed upon my lips.
I flung myself to the floor and began to pray fervently, in a flood of tears. But whose was that voice that had just rung out so painfully through the night? It did not belong to my dream; it was the voice of some living woman, and yet for me it was the very voice and accent of Aurélia. I opened my window. Outside all was peaceful, and the cry did not come again …
What had I done? I had troubled the harmony of the magic universe from which my soul drew the certitude of its own immortality. I was damned perhaps for having wished to pierce a redoubtable mystery and for offending against the divine law. I could expect nothing now except scorn and anger! The exasperated shadows fled away, with harsh cries, tracing fatal circles in the air, like birds at the approach of a storm.
I alone understand the ruin and disorder of the world. I know the cause, I alone know it. There are no remedies. But as for the cause, though I am forbidden to reveal it to anyone, I will tell you on condition that you say nothing to anyone, outside. The cause is this. (long pause) God is dead.
GAUTIER Even when there was no shadow of doubt left that the sickness had touched his brain, Gérard conserved all his intellectual capacities intact. There was no darkening, no aberration, no failure of precision, to betray the wild disorder of his mental faculties … When his fits of madness passed, he recovered full possession of himself, and used to recount what he had seen in his hallucinations with marvellous eloquence and poetry, things a hundred times superior to the fantasies produced by hashish or opium. It is a terrible pity that some stenographer did not record these amazing accounts.
NERVAL The visions which came to m
e continually in my sleep had reduced me to such a state of despair that I could hardly speak; the company of my friends was only a vague distraction; my whole spirit seemed wrapped up with these delusions, and I could not respond to any other ideas. I was unable to read or write ten lines together … One of my friends, called George Bell, undertook to overcome my utter discouragement. He took me off to various places in the country outside Paris, and kept gently talking even when I was silent, or only answered with a few incoherent phrases. His bearded face was strangely expressive, almost monkish … One day we were eating together under a trellis of flowers, in one of the little villages on the outskirts of the city, when a woman came to sing beside our table. There was something I could not explain in her tired but sympathetic voice that reminded me of Aurélia. I gazed up at her: even her facial features were not unlike those I had loved. The café people sent her away, and I did not dare retain her, but I said to myself: who knows if Aurelia’s spirit is not in that woman! And I was happy for the bit of money I had slipped her.
Sidetracks Page 12