Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  Only two parts of his writing seemed to throw any light. First are a scattering of autobiographical lyrics from that time, “La Grandmère”, “La Cousine”, “Le Coucher de Soleil”, and above all “Fantaisie”. The second is the opening of a much later prose work, Sylvie, which tries to analyse the feelings of those times explicitly, but in retrospect.

  Proust said that the poem “Fantaisie”, written in 1832, already held the seed of everything that would develop in Nerval’s finest work of the 1850s. It is a sixteen-line lyric describing the effect on Nerval of a particular old tune, “un air très vieux, languissant et funèbre”, which we may guess to be one of the folk-songs of the Valois heard in his childhood. For this single tune the poet would give “tout Rossini, tout Mozart, et tout Weber”. Every time he heard it, a trance seemed to come over his mind, and his spirit went back in time by two hundred years; or, rather, it grew two hundred years younger. He was carried back to the time of Louis XIII in the seventeenth century, and saw a mysterious château, with its pink brick and white cornerstones, standing on a green hillside in the sunset. The château was surrounded by beautiful parks and rivers (not unlike the mysterious “pleasure dome” of Kubla Khan). It was obviously an emblem of some kind; of Paradise, perhaps, or the idea of an ancestral home containing the continuity of family love across centuries; or even the “house of the imagination” set in its fruitful grounds. Above all it was a permanent place, beautiful and safe, a Romantic heartland.

  The implication is that the poet has travelled on a long journey and undergone many trials to reach it. “How few of us,” wrote Nerval twenty years after, “reach that famous château of brick and stone dreamed of in youth.” In the final stanza we find the château is inhabited: a woman with blonde hair and period clothes is waiting at a high window. Who is she? The Princess of the old legends, the Beloved, the Muse? The poet does not say. Only, in a skilfully managed shift of tense or time-frame, he suddenly reveals that he has seen her somewhere previously; he remembers that he remembers her: she is a dream within a dream.

  Puis une dame, à sa haute fenêtre,

  Blonde aux yeux noirs, en ses habits anciens

  Que, dans une autre existence peut-être

  J’ai déjà vu … et dont je me souviens!

  Here already, at the age of twenty-four, Nerval is announcing the twin themes of remembrance and of the mysterious woman glimpsed in another place, or another life, which are so central to his work and which produced two acknowledged nineteenth-century masterpieces, his sonnet sequence Les Chimères and his prose dream of the Valois, Sylvie. Even in such a simple poem the displacements of time are already complex, and there is a hint of the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls which was later to obsess Nerval. The poet’s “old languishing air” takes him back to something like a race-memory, and within that two-hundred-year-old vision there is enclosed a further memory, a further sense of déjà vu, so that the poem suggests both an infinite series and infinite longing.

  There are hidden autobiographical elements too, as I gradually discovered on my trips through the Ile de France. Nerval’s Valois is a land of châteaux: there is a seventeenth-century château at Mortefontaine, in whose park he used to play as a child; and through the woods to the north-west is the magnificent château of Chantilly, with its blue slate roofs and turrets standing on its reflection in the lake. This was the ancestral home of the last Due du Condé, who hanged himself in 1830 at nearby Saint-Leu, perhaps because of the unfaithfulness of his mistress the Duchesse de Feuchère. Nerval was fascinated by the story, and would later claim that he had seen the Duchesse riding through the woods in fancy-dress, as an Amazon huntress. This was quite possible, as she was a woman much given to theatricals and fêtes champêtres; her real name was Sophie Dawes, the daughter of an English fisherman—a perfect type of his princesse lointaine. Nerval called her Adrienne.

  Indeed, the whole poem is not unlike a piece of theatre: the music strikes up, the curtains of memory part, the blonde actress stands at her high window in the flaring light of the rampe or gas footlights, while Nerval sits entranced in the audience. It was something he did every night that he could manage it, during these years. One further resemblance struck me: the bold emblematic quality of the poem reminded me of those descriptions of the Tarot cards—here was a symbolic landscape, which suggested a stage in Nerval’s journey, the first phase of his magic quest which I was more deeply committed to following than I realised.

  If this was Nerval’s inner world, it was hardly something that Dr Labrunie understood. There was not only the gap between the down-to-earth doctor dealing with gynaecological problems and the intellectual young poet dreaming of blonde princesses in the sunset. There was also a generation gap, which many young writers experienced in post-war and post-Revolutionary France, disenchanted with the Napoleonic dreams of la gloire which had so held their fathers. De Vigny expressed something of this in his Servitude et grandeur militaires (1835), and Alfred de Musset even more in the opening of his Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836), in which he attempts to diagnose the peculiar mal, the restlessness and disillusion, that afflicted his contemporaries. Twenty years after, Nerval looked back and gave his own explanation in the opening of Sylvie (1854). And here I found, for the first time clearly described, that clash between the materialist confidence and the spiritual questioning which Nadar’s photography had challenged me to explore. “At that time we were living in a strange epoch,” Nerval wrote,

  like those that frequently succeed to revolutions or the collapse of mighty dynasties … It was an age that combined frenetic activity with hesitations and indolence; brilliant dreams of Utopia, religious or philosophic aspirations and ill-defined enthusiasms mixed up with vague hopes of some kind of renaissance; boredom with the conflicts of the past, with uncertain hopes for the future. It was something like the age of Peregrinus and Apuleius. Materialist man longed for a bunch of roses from the hands of the beautiful Isis that would spiritually regenerate him. She was the goddess, eternally young and pure, who appeared to us by night, and shamed us for our wasted days. But mundane ambition was irrelevant to us then, and the greedy scramble for places and honours alienated us from all spheres of practical activity. There only remained for refuge that ivory tower of the poets, where we climbed ever higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd below.

  The roses of Isis and the ivory tower! How sentimental and post-Romantic it seems—all “blue and rosy hues”—until one realises the underlying bitterness with which Nerval wrote it. The “ivory tower” was a phrase first used by Sainte-Beuve of Vigny, but curiously enough it is this passage in Sylvie that gave it currency, and in Robert’s great Dictionnaire Français its coinage is credited to Nerval. But in France the writers’ sense of alienation from prosperous society was genuine, much more so than in England; and soon this was to be seized upon and developed by ideologues of a very different kind, like Charles Fourier with his phalanstères and Karl Marx with his Communist Manifesto.

  The irony was that, in 1834, prosperity did suddenly come to Nerval. In January his maternal grandfather died, leaving him a considerable inheritance of some thirty thousand francs: money which he always regarded as his mother’s posthumous gift to him. It is difficult to establish how much this was in contemporary terms, as the basic prices of food and lodging were comparatively low in those days, while the yields on stocks and Government “funds” were far more speculative and variable. Nerval later argued with Dr Labrunie that it would never have been enough to provide him with an independent income, even if it had been wholly invested; nevertheless, had he done so it would undoubtedly have freed him from regular dependence on newspaper work, and in the bullish state of the market in the 1840s would eventually have made him a very rich man. It was a sum equivalent to perhaps forty thousand pounds.

  In the event, Nerval spent the greater part of it over the next three or four years: on clothes, on travel and on founding a quality illustrated magazine
Le Monde Dramatique, given over to his passion for the theatre and consisting of dramatic reviews, essays and theatre-scripts, and racy profiles of well-known actresses accompanied by expensive, full-page steel-engravings, the equivalent of modern pin-ups. He also gave up his room at the rue Saint-Martin, and lived in a series of bohemian apartments, many of them shared with Gautier, of which the most famous was in the impasse du Doyenné.

  The Doyenné was a picturesque cul-de-sac of crumbling seventeenth-century buildings off the place du Carrousel, running along the site of the National Convention in Revolutionary days, what is now the modern façade of the Louvre Palace. Nerval and his friends hired a vast attic studio where they lived together in a series of curtained-off alcoves and boxrooms, dossing down on piles of Turkish cushions or in silk-hung hammocks. They gave a number of memorable parties there between 1834 and 1836, culminating in the legendary “bal des truands”, packed with young painters, writers, diplomats, actresses and files de joie (“les cydalises”). They hired a cabaret orchestra to play illegally in the grounds of the royal stables next door, which they reached through a hole in the fence at the end of the impasse. There are numerous memoirs of this “bohème galante”, left in later days by Gautier, Arsène Houssaye (who became director of the Théâtre-Français), Camille Rogier and others. Nerval wrote his in 1852, an amusing and wistful collection of poetry and prose entitled Petits Châteaux de Bohème.

  For all its colourful eccentricities—Gautier in Spanish costume, Chasseriau painting nudes on the door panels, La Cydalise tempting visitors to her Spanish hammock, the concierge beating on the ceiling below, the fancy-dress suppers and the chain-dances that went right down the street—it is a melancholy work. “We were young, always full of spirits, often rich … But there I strike a more sombre note. Our palace is razed to the ground. I picked over the debris in the street last autumn.” Nerval says the Doyenné marked the first of the “seven châteaux” of a poet’s life, each of which was to be destroyed in turn.

  Gautier’s memoirs of this time are typically flamboyant by comparison. Nerval, he says, led a mysterious and scholarly life; he would read through the night with a candlestick tied to his head, and sleep at the foot of an enormous Renaissance four-poster bed, carved with salamanders and other symbolic devices, until the goddess of his dreams should descend to take her place between the sheets. “This monumental bed later proved a great embarrassment to Gerard’s nomadic life, and for a long time it remained in my apartment, since I was the only one who afterwards owned a room big enough to house it.” Balzac used the story of this bed in one of his novels, and the whole period of the Doyenné became richly embroidered with literary legends—many of them exaggerated.

  For Nerval the salient fact was that he had spent his inheritance. Most of it was lost when Le Monde Dramatique went bankrupt after a year of publication, in June 1836. He did, however, collaborate with Dumas on a comic-opera, Piquillo, which had its Paris première in October 1837, and in Brussels three years later. The lead-singer was a blonde cantatrice from Boulogne, Jenny Colon, with whom Nerval fell wildly and fashionably in love. Financially the piece was a success, and Nerval eventually earned some six thousand francs in royalties, which paid off some of his debts. But two other serious melodramas, L’Akhimiste and Leo Burckhart, both premiered in 1839, were comparative failures. The latter, a play set in Germany concerning a political intrigue, with Faustian overtones, was intended as Nerval’s masterpiece, and its withdrawal from the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre after only twenty-six performances profoundly depressed him. He was now thirty-one, and had failed to establish himself professionally in the theatre, as he had hoped, being dependent on collaborative work, dramatic reviewing and other piecemeal newspaper work, much of it arranged for him by Gautier in La Presse. Dr Labrunie reproached him, and blamed his son’s literary friends for leading him astray.

  It was during these years that Nerval discovered his taste for travel, and, as Gautier said, began to lead the life of a nomad. His natural gifts as a poet and linguist, never really suited to the popular theatre, began to flower in a particular kind of romantic travel-writing. It was both learned and eccentric, starting by reports on foreign theatre, art galleries and folk festivals, as conventionally required by newspapers, but gradually evolving into a series of picaresque adventures in which his own personality—full of self-deprecating bohemian whimsy and melancholy humour —came increasingly to occupy the forefront of the narrative. Such pieces of romantic self-dramatising became his unique art form, and it was as a traveller that I finally began to understand something of his true nature, and its mixture of helpless dreams and stubborn independence.

  4

  Nerval’s journeyings began from the moment he inherited his grandfather’s money. In the autumn of 1834 he left Paris, telling his father that he was going to visit relations in Aquitaine. In fact he travelled south-east to Avignon from where, carefully concealing his itinerary by messages sent to Gautier and other friends in Paris, he continued on into Italy, visiting Genoa and Florence before reaching Naples, where he stayed “living like a tramp” for ten days. He finally returned penniless and with split boots by ship to Marseille. The southern Mediterranean setting of Naples, and the ruins of Pompeii, were a revelation to him, and for the first time he felt the powerful, almost mystical attraction of Greece and Egypt and the Near East, which corresponded to some childlike hunger for faith in his make-up.

  For the first time, too, in several of his long travel-letters, I could at last catch his real voice. It was full of enigmatic anecdotes and humorous self-descriptions, such as his return to Marseille with “five sous” in his pocket, and a little leather valise containing “two lemons, some apples and pears … and an old pair of yellow gloves”. It was also at Naples that he seems to have had his first sexual experience, during a strange half-drunken night in the apartment of an Italian seamstress he met in a cafe after a visit to the theatre. This incident was later to take on immense psychological and symbolic significance for him, and he would write no less than five different versions of it between 1837 and 1853. In his letters of the time he gives only hints—a jealous husband who gets drunk on Lacrima Christi wine, a beautiful Judith by Caravaggio that took his “heart at the Naples museum, and the “hot cinders of Vesuvius which contributed considerably to the demoralisation of my boots”. But all these details, including the lemons, “sank into the bark” of his memory, to be later transformed in his stories and poems.

  In July 1836, immediately after the collapse of Le Monde Dramatique, Nerval was again abroad, this time with Gautier on a wild trip into Belgium, which was intended to provide the materials for a rakish novel provisionally entitled Confessions galantes de deux gentilshommes périgourdins. Nerval fell ill in Brussels and the novel was never written, but Gautier cleverly used the material in despatches to La Presse. The articles are enlivened by humorous accounts of Gautier’s unidentified travelling companion, an eccentric young man called “Fritz” who has a passion for all things Gothic and Teutonic, and is continuously getting into scrapes. At one point Fritz is thrown out of a Brussels cafe for “priapism”. Fritz has fallen in love with the well-endowed blonde woman of Rubens’s paintings, and he seeks everywhere for her equivalent in real life: he is “in pursuit of the big blonde”. Farcical overtones of Faust and Hoffmann’s Tales are woven in; but it is clear that Gautier has already discovered what wonderful copy Nerval provides. “Fritz” does not seem to have minded, as yet.

  In August 1838 Nerval was on the road once more, this time through Switzerland into Germany, alone. After a short stay in the elegant old spa-town of Baden, he followed the course of the Rhine northwards, through Strasbourg, Mannheim and Frankfurt. I was interested to find him retracing the steps of Dr Labrunie’s retreat with the Napoleonic army in 1813-14. In Frankfurt he met Dumas, and they researched German material for the play Leo Burckhart. He also wrote one of the earliest extant letters to his father, justifying his journalistic travels—“It i
s unbelievable to find to what degree French men of letters are welcomed and honoured in Germany”—and holding out the hope of a future commission from the French Government, “part-literary and part-political”.

  After the failure of Leo Burckhart Nerval quickly returned to Germany in October 1839. Travelling through Geneva and Zurich, he now pushed much further to the east, via Munich into Austria, reaching Vienna in November, where he remained for four months. He began to write a Vienna newsletter for the columns of La Presse, at the same time compiling a Government report on the translation and reception of French books in Germany, and questions of international copyright. To his father, he wrote long letters of self-justification, emphasising his professional seriousness and denying the colourful rumours that were already beginning to circulate in Paris about his adventures. Some idea of what these rumours were, and the way his friends joyfully embellished them, may be gathered from an ecstatic letter of Gautier’s written from Paris in January 1840. In it, one can catch that mixture of worship and mockery with which Gautier still regarded his former hero from the Lycée Charlemagne. Nerval still retained all the magic of adolescence; indeed, I began to wonder if Gautier would ever allow his old friend the prosaic business of growing up:

  I am waiting with the utmost impatience the history of your love-affairs and conquests. In your first epistle [ie newspaper article] you pretend to know the ladies of Vienna only by sight; this is a most immaterial method, and by now you should have passed to other means … Tell me what you eat, and especially what you drink; where you perch; how much human flesh costs, and whether the gorgeous ladies of that happy city give you a tight fit or a loose one; if the gin is strong and if the Rhine wine is good. Tell me what pleases you and what bores you—if a gentleman who has the happiness of always being in the company of Mr Gérard can ever be bored. Finally, tell me if you have found the big blonde, the blonde we have drunk so many steins of beer in pursuing. What a wonderful thing if we could go to Turkey together! What fine turbans and beautiful haiks we would buy … we would soon be far more expert in Eastern Passion than Alphonse Royer and we would take a small harem in common—not being jealous of each other—and inundate the newspapers of Europe with an enormous flood of copy. It would be fantastic!