Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  Nerval had been born on 22 May 1808 at No 96 rue Saint-Martin, just north of the place du Châtelet, and about five hundred metres from where he committed suicide in 1855. His father, Etienne Labrunie, was a military doctor whose family came from Aquitaine. His mother, Marguerite Laurent, was the daughter of a well-to-do Paris shopkeeper whose family came from the Valois, the region of lakes and forests around Chantilly in the Ile de France. Gérard was their only child. Etienne and Marguerite were much in love, and when in April 1809 Dr Labrunie was posted to the military hospital at Hanover (it was the beginning of Napoleon’s thrust to the East) Marguerite decided to accompany him on service with the Grande Armée. Gérard, not quite two years old, was left with the family of Marguerite’s uncle, Antoine Boucher, in the Valois at the tiny village of Mortefontaine.

  Here he grew up until the age of six, looked after by various cousins and aunts, running wild in the countryside, and having long letters from his mother in Germany read to him, describing her travels and adventures. Nerval recalled at the end of his life:

  The letters that my mother wrote from the shores of the Baltic, and the banks of the Danube and the Spree were read over to me so many times! The feeling for the marvellous and my taste for distant travels, were doubtless the result of these earliest impressions, together with this long period I spent in the remote countryside in the depth of the woods. Often given into the care of servant-girls and peasant folk, my mind was nourished on bizarre beliefs, local legends and traditional songs. In all this there was the stuff of which poets are made; but I am only a dreamer in prose.

  During the course of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, Dr Labrunie was promoted to direct the big military hospital at Gross-Glogau in what is now Poland. But his wife Marguerite caught a fever while crossing a bridge piled with bodies, and died tragically in 1812, at the age of twenty-five. She was buried in the Catholic cemetery of Glogau. Her son had never been old enough to remember her face. In some ways neither Dr Labrunie nor Gérard ever recovered from this blow. Caught up in the disastrous retreat, Dr Labrunie lost all his personal effects—including the pictures of his wife, and her jewellery—during the terrible crossing of the Beresina, when thousands of French troops drowned in the icy waters. In 1814 he returned to France, and rode to Mortefontaine to collect his little son. He was by now a hardened campaign officer, aged forty-three, and limped from the effect of two leg wounds.

  Nerval recalled that traumatic reunion:

  I was seven years old, and playing carelessly at my uncle’s door, when three officers appeared in front of the house. The blackened gold of their uniforms barely gleamed beneath their military greatcoats. The first one hugged me to him with such emotion, that I cried out: “Father… you are hurting me!” All three were returning from the siege of Strasbourg. The oldest, saved from the waters of the frozen Beresina, took me with him to learn what were called my duties.

  These two autobiographical passages, describing the earliest memories of his mother, his father and the magic childhood in the Valois, show the simplicity of Nerval’s prose at its best. Everything is presented with quiet, factual observations, yet every detail carries a subtle weight of implied meaning. Four bitter years of warfare and final, crushing defeat of a whole Imperial dream is indicated by that “or noirci de leurs uniformes”. While the rising and falling rhythm of the short descriptive phrases, and the tolling of the distant place-names—Baltic, Danube, Spree, Strasbourg, Beresina—convey an irresistible elegiac mood. The mixture of love and pain caused by his father’s return—the embrace that causes hurt—became a permanent element in Nerval’s feelings as an only child. So too does the unspoken question: why had Marguerite died—and who was to blame?

  After 1815 Dr Labrunie set up a gynaecological practice in Paris. He never remarried, but Nerval implies that a number of women paid court to the doctor; the child was regularly bought presents, and often spoilt by maidservants and the Laurent relations. Discipline was benevolent but strict: Labrunie’s batman was put in charge of the young boy, and often took Gérard for long walks before dawn over the hills of Montmartre and the surrounding Parisian countryside, still at that date a place of farms, vineyards and flocks of sheep. Ever after, Nerval was addicted to little excursions, or promenades, around Paris, and had an almost religious reverence for observing the sunrise. A sleepless night followed by the heady, slightly unreal sensation of a new dawn, became a constant theme in his “prose dreams”.

  In the evenings, at sunset, his father would sometimes play the guitar, singing Italian love-songs and laments, and crying over his lost wife. Nerval always recalled one song that began, “Mamma mia, medicate …”, that is, “Oh my mother, heal this wound of mine, for pity’s sake …” For the little boy, the lost mother became a sacred figure. For the widowed father, Gerard with his blond hair, grey eyes and angelic good looks served as a constant reminder of lost love. Together father and son made a sort of romantic cult of their bereavement.

  Gérard was sent to the Lycée Charlemagne, where he became a model pupil, especially gifted in languages. According to his own account, he studied Italian, Greek, Latin, German, Arabic and Persian. He loved the poetic mythology of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Teutonic legends. Characteristically, he developed the most beautiful rounded handwriting—quite unlike the loose, racy script of many of his literary contemporaries—“elaborated and elegant like the most famous manuscripts of Iran”. All the letters and holograph poems that I saw retain this physical clarity, this sense of “best behaviour”, even in the later and extreme phases of his apparent madness. Dr Labrunie regarded him as a brilliant and gifted child and was immensely proud of him. He planned for him an ambitious professional career: either as a diplomat, with his love of languages and foreign places; or, with his apparently quiet and analytical approach to life, following in his father’s footsteps as a doctor.

  In the summer holidays Nerval was still sent back to Uncle Antoine Boucher’s house at Mortefontaine, where he was teased and admired as “le petit Parisien”, so modest and so clever. He recalls how he became romantically attached to a number of pretty country girls there, Héloïse, Sylvie, Fanchette (he gives them many names). His uncle, besides owning a parrot and a collection of antiquities, also had a remarkable library of archaeological and other specialist books, where he was allowed to browse, pursuing his taste for mythology and legends. The old man would discuss religion, in the eighteenth-century style of Voltaire and Rousseau, pouring scorn on the superficialities of conventional Christianity. Nerval later described the unsettling effect of this in his Preface to Les Illuminés (1850), a collection of biographical essays on seventeenth-century illuminati; and in Aurélia, the autobiography of his madness. His uncle was an amateur archaeologist, and collector of coins and fragments which he used to dig up in an allotment he owned just outside Mortefontaine, known as the “clos de Nerval”.

  The exact site of this clos or paddock is no longer certain, but one warm May afternoon, I caught a country bus for the first time into the land of the Valois, and found myself in another world of forests, lakes and blossoming hedgerows. I walked along the little winding road from Mortefontaine to the village of Loisy, following the stream of the Thène, and an old man putting up bean sticks leaned on his spade and pointed with his thumb to the wood running to the west; “Il y en a des clos partout ici, voyez-vous. Mais c’est ça, le bois de Nerval. On y chasse les lapins, le matin.”

  Describing his uncle’s hobby and its effect on his religious education, Nerval wrote reflectively:

  The country where I was brought up was full of strange legends and bizarre superstitions. One of my uncles, who had the greatest influence on my early education, had taken up the hobby of studying Roman and Celtic antiquities. He sometimes found in his paddock, or round about, the images and medallions of gods and Roman emperors, which his learned admiration led me to venerate, while his books taught me their history. A particular Mars in golden bronze, a Pallas Athene or armed Venus, a
Neptune and an Amphitryon carved above the village pump … were the household gods and guardians of this remote place. I admit they then inspired more reverence in me than the poor Christian images in the church, and the two shapeless statues of saints standing in the doorway … Confused in the midst of these many different symbols, I asked my uncle one day who God really was. “God,” he told me, “is the sun.”

  It was the answer, said Nerval, of an honest countryman who had always lived as a Christian, but who had passed through the upheaval of the French Revolution. He himself always felt the heir to this confusion of beliefs, mixing the scepticism of the Enlightenment with the imaginative faith of Romanticism: the renewed fascination with classical mythology, magic beliefs, pantheism and the rich poetry of local superstitions.

  I found the two “shapeless saints” still standing at the doorway of the little Romanesque church in Mortefontaine. One appears to be a statue of the Virgin, her face worn away into a curiously haunting smile made by a trick of the stone; she is nursing the remnants of a child. The other is probably St Denis, his head wearing his bishop’s mitre, which he holds in the grotesque symbolism of Christian martyrdom detached in front of him, like a sacrificial fruit.

  Gautier tells another famous story which bears on this weird polytheism of Nerval’s. At a literary dinner-party in Victor Hugo’s apartments in the place des Vosges, Nerval was leaning on the mantelpiece “whirling together the Heavens and Hells of several quite different religions with studious impartiality”. One of the other guests remarked somewhat cuttingly that it was perfectly obvious that Nerval didn’t believe in any religion at all.

  “Gérard surveyed his interlocutor with an expression of immense scorn, and transfixed him with those glittering grey eyes of his, dancing with their strange scintillations. ‘No religion at all? I have no religion?—but I have seventeen religions—seventeen at least.’”

  It was a good story, and allowed Gautier to remark sententiously that the “fine Pantheon of Gerard’s intellect eventually became a Pandemonium.”

  When Gautier first met Nerval at the Lycée Charlemagne he was already a byword among his fellow-pupils for his immense reading, golden good looks, modest demeanour and dizzy poetical ambitions. He was one of those sixth-form heroes, so beloved of later Victorian fiction, of whom parents and masters are overbearingly proud, and of whom great things are too confidently expected. Gautier was two years younger than Nerval, and though his own ambition was to be a painter—he soon became an unofficial student at the Rioult atelier, supported by doting parents—he hero-worshipped his fellow-pupil and saw him as a leader of the new Romantic generation who were to follow in Victor Hugo’s footsteps. Indeed, at the age of eighteen, a year before he left the Lycée, Nerval published two small pamphlets of poetry, one patriotic—the Elégies Nationales—the other satirical, L’Académie ou les membres introuvables (1826).

  But Nerval’s greatest triumph drew on his German reading and his adolescent dreams of the tragic and romantic land beyond the Rhine. Shutting himself up in his room above the surgery in the rue Saint-Martin, he worked steadily through the winter of 1827 to produce a superb verse translation of Goethe’s Faust (Part I). This was taken on by the commercial and literary publisher Renduel, and issued in 1828, bringing Nerval great critical acclaim, personal invitations to the soirées of Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve and later a request from Berlioz to use the translation for the libretto of his Faust opera. The edition was shown to the aging Goethe himself, who said that he “had never been so well understood”. Nerval later completed Faust (Part II), and the book ran to a second edition; to this day it is still the text published by Garnier-Flammarion.

  Nerval at twenty thus had a reputation as a scholar-poet and a prodigy; he was courted by newspaper editors; received the coveted permission to use and borrow books from the Bibliothèque Royale (now Nationale); sought after by tough professional writers like Alexandre Dumas in search of bright young theatrical collaborators; and even praised and supported by leading critics like Jules Janin.

  Dr Labrunie was delighted with his offspring, seeing Faust as his son’s passport to a professional career in newspapers, diplomacy or perhaps, still, as a fashionable young doctor. But for Nerval it was the golden key to a purely literary future—in poetry, literary translation and above all in the most glamorous of romantic forms, the popular theatre. Only two events shadowed his life at this moment: the death in 1826 of tante Eugénie, aged twenty-five, his mother’s youngest sister and perhaps his closest woman friend; and two years later, in 1828, the death of grandmère Boucher, a beloved figure from the Mortefontaine summers of his childhood and adolescence.

  Nerval bitterly missed these two maternal presences, and he wrote one of his best early poems about the latter, “La Grandmère”, describing how he was unable to weep at her funeral—“I wandered through the house, astonished rather than grief-struck”—but later wept in secret when all else seemed to have forgotten her, so that as the months and years went by, “like a name carved in the bark of a tree, her memory sank in deeper!” Again, it is a typical Nervalian image, deceptive in its simplicity. But one implication seems to be that, while the names of the dead are carved on gravestones and gradually wear away, the names of loved ones are also carved in living materials and slowly bite deeper into our lives. Mamma mia, medicate …

  3

  It is from this time that I became aware of an increasing struggle within Nerval’s own personality, which first expressed itself as a clash with his father over the question of his career. To begin with this did not seem particularly unusual. After the success of Faust Nerval began to lead a double life, divided as it were between bourgeois and bohemian personae, the model pupil and the eccentric young poet. This was a frequent dilemma for young nineteenth-century writers, who would normally depend on some form of financial allowance to get them launched, and hence on continuing parental support and approval. If Nerval had had a mother to intercede for him (as Gautier’s mother so frequently did for her son) things might have been very different. As it was, Dr Labrunie clung close to the son of whom he was so proud, and constantly tried to manage his future. Nerval remained with his father at the rue Saint-Martin until 1834, when he was twenty-six. He was apprenticed in turn to a publisher, to a firm of lawyers and as a medical externe. During the cholera epidemic in Paris of 1832 he accompanied his father on more than fifty visits to sick or dying patients; the idea of serving society as a doctor or spiritual healer never left him, and recurs vividly in the last five years of his life.

  At the same time, Nerval was pursuing a wild life as a leading member of the so-called Jeunes-France, with Gautier, Petrus Borel (Le Lycanthrope), the dandy-illustrator Camille Rogier, and the sculptor Jehan Duseigneur who cut a dashing medallion of Nerval’s handsome profile in 1831. They were all members of the Young Romantics or petit-cénacle, who were in effect the literary groupies of Victor Hugo. Nerval attended the famous battle of Hernani, when the Romantics literally fought it out with the Classics during the twenty-five nights of Hugo’s Spanish melodrama at the Théâtre-Français, though Gautier noted that Nerval always slipped out before the end so that he would not be late for supper with his father. Nerval was twice arrested during this time, once in 1831 for “breach of the peace at night”, and again in 1832 for suspected involvement in political disturbances. He left an amusing account of his incarcerations at Sainte-Pélagie, in Mes Prisons. Above all Nerval developed an absolute passion for the theatre, submitting a number of scripts to the Odéon, including Lara and the Prince des Sots (“The Prince of Fools”), and cultivating platonic worship for various young actresses, as was the fashion, whom he hoped might star in his erotic epic-drama, little trace of which remains, entitled La Reine de Saba (“The Queen of Sheba”).

  Yet during this six-year period Nerval produced little work of value, except for a number of exquisite verse translations and some short lyric poems of which “Fantaisie” is the most justly famous. It is hardly su
rprising that Dr Labrunie became increasingly anxious and severe; nor would it have amused the ex-officer of the Grande Armée that his brilliant son now had a police record. He might have expected some wild oats, but this was a worrying crop; as Nerval would later say, they were “les dents du vieux dragon”—dragon’s teeth sown in the mind, to bear strange and bitter fruit.

  But what was going on in Nerval’s mind during these early years? It was nothing like the youth of the English Romantics—no urges to reform the world, no great experiments in living, no passionate affairs or disastrous marriages, no concentrated bursts of literary self-expression. I puzzled over this. Everything seemed so much an external question of style, of fashion, of cliques, of cultivated bohemian dress and behaviour. It was all so artificial, so thoroughly—well, French.

  The most solid professional fact appeared to be the vast sums of money to be made in the theatre, when writers like Hugo had overnight successes with Hernani (1830); or Dumas with La Tour de Nesle (1832) or Alfred de Vigny with Chatterton. “The pistols of young suicides,” said Gautier, “could be heard cracking across all the attic rooms of Paris.” There was also the rise of the daily newspaper, which began to employ well-known critics and literary columnists like Janin on high salaries, and to pay enormous fees for serial fiction—feuilletons—from novelists like Balzac. Both these outlets—the theatre and the press—were soon to shape Nerval’s outward life. But the inner life: what of that? There were less than twenty surviving letters from Nerval up to 1834, almost all of them concerning publishing, and none of them really personal: none to his father, none to Gautier, none to any woman. There were no diaries. I felt uneasily that I still understood very little of his character, or the mysterious charm he exercised over his friends. He was still “le ténébreux”.