Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  (radiophonics)

  GEORGE BELL He seemed to trust me, since I too had suffered as he was suffering now. During his worst hours, he never feared to reveal what was going on inside his mind to me. I undertook to try and cure him, and as the fine weather had come round again (it was the summer of’53), we started making a series of long expeditions on foot, sometimes lasting several days, in the countryside around Paris. While we walked along, usually in the woods around Meudon, Sèvres, Saint-Cloud, Versailles, and Saint-Germain, I tried to help him recover the feeling of confidence and enthusiasm which gives one the strength to write. When Gérard recounted to me memories of his childhood, or of his love affair, I was extremely careful to prevent him slipping back into his dream state, and continually emphasized the value and power of the reality-principle in literature. Bit by bit, he seemed to emerge from his torpor, and it was then that he wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes, who always liked printing his pieces, the arcadian romance ‘Sylvie’, one of the most sensitive things he ever produced. But this was only a brief respite allowed by his sickness. The least accident could set it off again …

  NERVAL In despair, I went along in tears to Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where I knelt at the altar of the Virgin, and asked pardon for my faults. Something inside me said: the Virgin is dead, and your prayers are useless … When I came to the Place de la Concorde, my idea was to destroy myself. Several times I made my way down to the Seine, but something always prevented me from carrying out my purpose. The stars were glittering in the firmament. Suddenly it seemed as if they had all gone out, all at the same time, like the candles I had seen in the church. I thought that the time had been accomplished, and that the end of the world was approaching as announced in the Apocalypse of St John. I thought I could see a black sun in the empty sky, and a blood-red sphere above the Tuileries gardens.

  I said to myself: ‘Eternal night is beginning, and it will be terrible. What will happen when men realize that there is no more sun?’

  I came back by the rue Saint-Honoré, and pitied the belated workmen I encountered on the way. When I arrived at the Louvre, I walked as far as the place, and found a weird spectacle waiting for me. Through the scudding clouds I could see several different moons racing overhead. I imagined that the earth had gone out of its orbit, and was drifting helplessly through space like a dismasted ship, and that the stars grew large or diminished as we drew away from one and approached another. For two or three hours I stood contemplating this chaos, and finished by going off towards Les Halles. The country work people were carrying in their boxes of farm produce, and I said to myself: ‘How astonished they will be when they see that the night is continuing, endlessly.’ Yet the dogs began to bark in the distant streets, and the cocks crowed.

  GEORGE BELL The new crisis reached its climax at the end of August 1853, a few days after the publication of ‘Sylvie’. Gérard became unable to sleep at all, and spent several nights on the hills above Montmartre, where he had walked as a boy, waiting obsessively for the sunrise. He then went down to the market at Les Halles, got into an argument with one of the porters, and knocked him down. Next he attacked a postman, pointing to his silver badge and saying he was an aristocrat and should not go into a low café, and threatening to kill him. He stood in the middle of the streets and threw money in the air. Then he went to visit his father, and finding him not at home, he left a bunch of marguerites. He crossed over the river to the Jardin des Plantes, and made a scene in front of the animal cages, and threw his hat to the hippopotamus. Returning to the Palais-Royal, he ran shouting through the arcades and joined in a circle of little girls dancing in the gardens. Then, pursued by a growing crowd, he rushed to the rue Saint-Honoré, and caused an uproar in a tabac trying to buy a cigar with a special seal. When he came out, he was surrounded by an angry mob; but just at this moment, I and two friends arrived, and dragged him into a café. Gérard was finally extricated, put into a cab, and taken off to the hospital of La Charite, where he was put in a straitjacket.

  NERVAL It seemed that the goddess appeared to me, saying: ‘I am the same as Mary, the same as your mother, the same as all those others you have always loved in every guise. At each of your trials I have thrown off one of the masks which covers my true features, and soon you will see me as I really am …’ During the night my delirium increased, but especially the following morning when I discovered that I was tied up. I managed to get out of the straitjacket and towards morning I began to walk through the other wards. Persuaded that I had become like a god, and had the power of healing, I laid hands on some of the patients, and coming to a statue of the Virgin, I took off her crown of artificial flowers and put them on my head to increase the powers which I believed I had been given. I walked with huge strides, talking with animation about the ignorance of men who believed they could cure people through Science alone. Noticing a flask of ether on a table, I swallowed it at one gulp.

  One of the hospital housemen, with a face that I said was like an angel, came up and tried to stop me. We struggled, but I was filled with immense nervous energy, and I overcame him and was about to fling him to the floor when I stopped myself. I told him he did not understand my mission. Then other doctors arrived, and I continued my speech on the impotence of their medical art. Next I went down some stairs to the outside, even though I had no shoes, and coming to a garden I went in and wandered over the lawn and began to pick flowers.

  One of my friends had come back to collect me. I left the garden with him, and while he was talking to me, they suddenly threw another straitjacket over my head, and forced meinto a cab and drove me to an asylum outside Paris.

  Seeing myself among the mental patients, I understood that up to then all this had been my delusions. Nevertheless, the promises that I attributed to the goddess Isis seemed to be realized in a series of trials that I was destined to undergo at the asylum. So I accepted them with resignation.

  HOLMES The asylum was the celebrated institution of Dr Émile Blanche, a large private clinic with a walled garden, at No. 2 rue du Seine, Passy. Gérard was to remain a patient there for the best part of twelve months, and was only finally discharged a few weeks before his death.

  Blanche’s asylum was famous throughout Europe. The worst kind of physical maltreatment had been abolished, accommodation was comfortable, and Blanche, who visited all his patients personally, was one of the pioneers in the use of art therapy. The garden walls were covered with grotesque murals, and the public rooms filled with strange paintings and sculptures, all done by patients.

  The basis of Dr Blanche’s system was the application of three ascending grades of treatment, known familiarly to the inmates as ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Paradise’. In ‘Hell’, the most severely disturbed cases were subject to a regime of solitary confinement, straitjacket, severely reduced diets, and regular visitations to the dreaded baths in the cellar, where they were forcibly immersed in freezing-cold water. Once a patient’s disposition improved, he passed into ‘Purgatory’, where he was encouraged to rest for long periods, eat well, and take limited recreation periods in the garden and public rooms. Finally, in ‘Paradise’, patients were given general freedom of the house and gardens; ate together at a common table with Dr Blanche and his senior assistants; and they were encouraged to invite friends to visit, and to take short accompanied day-trips back to Paris.

  Gérard was to pass through all three of these stages of Dr Blanche’s salvation, with several relapses, before attaining the status of a special patient, almost a friend of Blanche’s, renting his own room. But his trials began in ‘Hell’.

  (screams, laughter, water, echoes, horror …)

  NERVAL Is my soul an indestructible molecule, a single bubble puffed with a bit of air, but always finding again its place in nature? Or is it simply this emptiness, this image of oblivion, disappearing in immensity? Will it always be a mortal particle, destined in all its transformations to suffer the vengeance of the powerful?

  I saw mysel
f having to call my whole life to account, and even my previous existences. In proving that I was good, I would prove that I had always been good. And if I had been evil, I told myself, then surely my present life would be a sufficient expiation? This thought reassured me, but did not stop me fearing that I would be classed for ever among the damned.

  I felt myself plunged into cold water, and even colder water streaming over my skull. I concentrated my thoughts on the eternal Isis, the mother goddess and the sacred bride. All my longings, all my prayers were combined in this magic name. I felt myself come alive again in her, and sometimes she appeared to me in the form of the classical Venus, and sometimes also with the features of the Holy Virgin of the Christians. At night her dear apparition came again, more clearly, and yet I said to myself: ‘What can she do for her poor children, being herself vanquished and perhaps persecuted?’

  (music bridge)

  One night, I was shouting and singing in a sort of ecstasy. One of the asylum attendants came to my cell and took me downstairs to a ground-floor room, and locked me in. I continued in my dream, and even though I was standing up, I thought I was shut inside a kind of oriental pavilion. I ran my hands along the sides, and saw that the room was octagonal. A low couch was fitted round the walls, and these seemed to be made of thick glass through which I could see treasures, rich shawls and tapestries shining. Through the iron trellis of the door appeared a moonlit landscape, and I thought I could make out the shapes of rocks and tree-trunks. I had already seen this place in some previous existence, and I seemed to recognize the deep mountain grottoes of Ellora in Egypt.

  Little by little the faint blue light of early morning penetrated the pavilion, and filled it with bizarre images. I now thought I was in the midst of a vast slaughter-house, where the history of the universe was written in characters of blood. The body of a gigantic woman was depicted in front of me: only her various parts were cut in pieces as if by sabre strokes. The bodies of other women of different races, becoming larger and clearer at every moment, covered the other walls with a bleeding mass of jumbled limbs and heads, empresses and queens and humble peasant girls. This was the history of all crime, and it was enough to turn one’s eyes to any point on the walls or ceiling, to behold some ghastly tragedy re-enacted there.

  ‘This is the result of the power offered to men,’ I said to myself. ‘Bit by bit they have destroyed and slashed to a thousand pieces the eternal type of Beauty, until the human race has lost most that is energy and perfection.’ And indeed, I could see along a particular line of shadow cast by a crack in the door, the descending inheritance of all future races.

  At dawn I was at last dragged from my dark meditations. The kind and compassionate face of my excellent doctor brought me back to the land of the living.

  (music bridge and the sound of a pen scratching on paper)

  Passy, 2nd December 1853. My dear Papa … I’m working hard, though things are going round and round in the same circle rather; but my black ideas have left me … The peace I enjoy in this house fills me with delight and determination. It would be Paradise indeed if I could only have a bit more freedom. I hope Dr Blanche will decide as much himself: for my presence in Paris is becoming indispensable for dealing with my literary affairs, and winter is the time for preparing books for publishers. I am undertaking to write about my illness, and set down in detail all the impressions it has brought me. This will be a study not without value for medical discussion and science. I have never felt more capable of analysis and description. I hope you will judge so yourself … I embrace you. Your devoted son, Gérard Labrunie de Nerval.

  GAUTIER The study of his madness on which Gérard embarked is one of the most extraordinary creations ever to come from a writer’s pen. It has been said of ‘Aurélia, or The Dream and the Life’ that it is the autobiography of Madness itself. But it would be more accurate to say that it was the memoirs of Madness ghosted by Reason. The philosopher is always present, calm and controlled, even in the midst of the wild hallucinations of the visionary.

  NERVAL Dr Blanche has given me a special room – it is at the topmost point of the sanatorium and it is the only one with the privilege of a window. It looks over the courtyard, over the thick leaves of a walnut tree, and two Chinese mulberries. Beyond them I can vaguely glimpse a busy street through the green-painted trellis of bars. At sunset, the whole horizon seems to expand. It is like looking down on a country village, with windows circled with climbing plants or cluttered with bird-cages, or strings of drying underwear; every now and then you see some young woman’s face look out, or an old granny, or the pink head of a child. People shout across to each other, there is singing, and sudden bursts of laughter. It is cheerful to hear, or sad, depending on the time of day, and the mood you are in.

  Here, surrounded by the debris of my different adventures I am writing once again.

  ALEXANDRE

  DUMAS As far as men of science are concerned, poor Gérard is mentally sick and needing medical treatment; but we ourselves believe he is simply a better writer, a better dreamer, a better wit, and generally more cheerful (or more sad) than ever before. Sometimes he believes he is the eastern king Solomon, waiting for the Queen of Sheba; sometimes that he is Sheikh Ghera-Gherai wishing to declare war on the Emperor Nicholas; and sometimes that he is mad … Well, judge for yourselves. A few days ago he dropped into the office of the Musketeer when I was out (a rare thing), and while waiting, took pen and paper, and left the following verses by way of an amusing visiting card.

  NERVAL

  I am the shadow-man, the widower, the mourner,

  The Prince of Aquitaine in the Broken Tower;

  My only Star is dead, and my Zodiac Guitar

  Shines with the Black Sun of Melancholia.

  In the night of my Tomb, O you who appeased me,

  Give back my Posilippo, and the bright sea of Italy;

  Give back the Flower that eased my poor heart’s pain,

  The trellis-bower where the Rose embraced the Vine.

  Am I Amor or Phoebus? Am I Lusignan or Byron?

  My brow still burns with the Queen’s red kiss;

  I have dreamed in the Grotto where the watery Siren is.

  And twice, oh twice victor, have I swum the dark Acheron Tuning

  and re-tuning on my Orphic lyre

  The Holy Lady’s sighs of woe,

  The Fairy Woman’s cries of fire.

  The countryside where I was brought up was full of strange legends and bizarre superstitions. One of my uncles, who had by far the greatest influence on my early education, had taken up collecting Roman and Celtic antiquities as his hobby. In his vegetable garden, or in the surrounding fields, he would sometimes dig up coins and statues carrying the images of the ancient gods and emperors. His admiration for them, as an antiquarian, made me look on them with veneration, and I studied their history in his books. A certain statue of Mars in gilded bronze, a Pallas Athene armed, a Neptune and Amphitryon carved above the village fountain, and, above all, the fat, kindly bearded face of a Pan smiling from the entrance of a grotto, among the festoons of myrtle and ivy, were the household gods and guardians of this remote retreat. I have to admit that they then inspired me with much greater veneration than the poor Christian images in the church, and the two shapeless saints above the church door, that certain local experts claimed – anyway – were really the twin gods Eaus and Cernunnos of the ancient Gauls.

  I found myself confused in the midst of all these differing symbols, and one day I asked my uncle what God really was. ‘God’, said my uncle, ‘is the sun.’

  I was always surrounded by young girls; one of them was my aunt; two servants of the house, Jeanette and Fanchette, also lavished their attentions on me. My childish smile recalled my mother’s, and my blond softly-curling hair covered my precocious forehead in a disorderly mop. I became enamoured of Fanchette, and I conceived the singular idea of taking her for my bride according to the rites of our ancestors. I celebrated the mar
riage service myself, acting out the ceremony with the aid of an old dress of my grandmother’s thrown over my shoulders. My brow was encircled with a silver-spangled ribbon, and I had heightened the natural colour of my cheeks with a light touch of rouge. I called to witness the God of our fathers, and the Blessed Virgin, of whom I had a medallion, and everyone willingly joined in this naïve game.

  Then there was the river Nonette, glittering in the meadows bordering the last houses of the village. Ah, the Nonette! One of those lovely little streams where I fished for crayfish; and on the other side of the forest runs her sister stream the Thève, where I was nearly drowned for not wanting to appear a fool in front of the little peasant girl, Célénie.

  Célénie often appeared to me in my dreams, like a water-nymph, naïve temptress, wild and lightheaded from the scent of the meadows, crowned with water-lilies and wild celery, and revealing behind her childish laughter and dimpled cheeks, the pearly teeth of the Germanic water-sprite …

  Célénie loved the grottoes lost in the woods of Chantilly, the old ruined chateaux, the crumbling temples and columns festooned with ivy, and the woodcutters’ camp-fires, where she would sing and tell of the old legends, like the story of Madame de Montfort imprisoned in her tower, who would sometimes fly away in the shape of a swan.

  I was seven years old, and playing heedlessly at my uncle’s doorstep, when three military officers appeared in front of the house; the blackened gold of their uniforms shone dully beneath their helmets. The first one hugged me to him with such energy that I cried out: ‘Father … you are hurting me!’