Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  Nerval did not discover the true content of this long article until four months after it was written. His friends kept it from him, merely saying that Janin had written a kindly piece, which made light of his illness. Nerval even sent thanks to Janin via friends, remarking that his friendship was unalterable: “It was he who put pen and bread into my hand; he is continuing his good works.” When he did finally read the piece his bitterness and sense of betrayal were overwhelming. In August 1841 he wote a long open letter to Janin at the Débats for publication. It is notable that this letter was approved by Dr Blanche, for it carries the “passed” stamp of the asylum. It seemed to me a key passage in Nerval’s biography, for it shows his own identity being taken out of his hands, carefully packaged, and cleverly served up for the avid consumption of Parisian readers. At the same time, Nerval managed to state his case with admirable calm, and even a kind of smiling acceptance:

  You have greatly compromised us in the eyes of our friends in Paris and abroad. Anthony will very willingly forgive you, but what shall I say—I who owe you so much gratitude for your help?… Last February, following a journey in Northern Europe, I was struck down by a sudden illness and rumour said that I had died of an apoplectic fit. Several newspapers spread this story, thanks to the singular nature of the attack which took place in the street during the middle of the night. You then decided to publish a biographical article about me, twelve columns long, in which you placed me so high and held me up to the admiration of Europe, that I had either to hide myself away or die of shame because I was not really dead after all, and had been heaped with such unmerited renown… Nearly all my friends have followed your example, and everyone agreed to make me into a sort of prophet, or mad visionary, whose reason had been lost in Germany undergoing the irritations of the secret societies, or in the study of Eastern symbols… Since that time, those of my friends who do not believe in my death (and there are those who obstinately insist on it, so they do not recognise me in the street) continue to bemoan my lost reason, and greet me with expressions of condolence: “What a tragedy!” they say around me, “a young writer of such style and promise! Such a fine intelligence wiped out without hope of recovery! And he has left us hardly anything … What a tragedy!” And it is in vain that I speak, I reason, I write even. “What a terrible pity!” they still repeat, “France has lost a genius who might have done her honour … only his friends really knew him!” With the result, my dear Janin, that I have become the living tomb of that Gerard de Nerval whom you loved, supported and encouraged for so long. May my complaint reach your heart!

  I doubt if anywhere else in the history of biography can one find a subject who so bitterly and eloquently accuses his own biographer—from beyond the grave, as it were. To be consigned to death, or madness; to be made—in that haunting phrase—le tombeau vivant of your own identity, for the purposes of the literary stock-market: here indeed was a novel fate, vividly expressive of the confused values of the time.

  Here too, my own position as biographer began to be shaken with doubts, and I first glimpsed the labyrinth into which I was stepping. Who exactly was the man I was trying to write about? Was the real personality entirely hidden? Was he the tragi-comic creation of his own “friends”? (How repeatedly that word occurs now in Nerval’s letters, taking on more and more doubtful meaning. How can your “friends” be those who do not recognise you?)

  Moreover, the more I reflected on this public letter, the more subtle its implications became. Was it wrong, after all, to accept it at face value? Was it, itself, the product of an unbalanced mind, a paranoid expression of grief and guilt, an unfounded belief that the whole literary world (“Europe”, even) was mocking and persecuting him? How does one square it with the fact that Janin decided not to publish the letter in the Débats, yet persuaded the Government to grant Nerval financial aid from the cultural funds for his great Eastern voyage? Or again, was the letter in fact a brilliant piece of self-publicity? Was Nerval somehow himself exploiting the exotic reputation he had earned as une sorte de prophète, d’illuminé, and deliberately trying to put it to literary use?

  This last suggestion may seem far-fetched; but there was one particular consequence of his eight months in the asylum at Montmartre which gave me pause for thought. Hitherto, it may have been noticed that while I refer to “Nerval”, all his friends including Gautier talk about “Gérard”. It is almost as if we have been talking about two different people. There is a reason for this discrepancy. From the very beginning Nerval never used his family name—Labrunie—to sign published work. Instead he used a number of noms-de-plume, including Fritz, Aloysius, the initials G.G., and most usually his Christian name—Gérard—tout court. This is not so surprising as it sounds, for many of his contemporaries used the most exotic made-up names during their bohemian phase, often so as not to shock their families.

  Whether Nerval had a particular reason for not wanting to use his father’s name, besides simple propriety, is another question; the impulse to alter or suppress a family name can sometimes have deeper psychological meaning, similar to the conviction that one is an illegitimate child, fathered secretly by some great historical figure. The madhouses of Paris were full of Napoleon’s unrecognised offspring.

  Be that as it may, Nerval always consistently signed his private correspondence “Gérard” to friends, and “Gérard Labrunie” to his family, and there seems nothing odd about this. However, during the asylum year of 1841 this suddenly changes. He composes the symphonic and haunting name, Gérard de Nerval. He does, quite literally, find a new identity. In a letter to Edmond Leclerc of 8 March, Nerval signs himself with the wild humour typical of his manic phases, “a madman who believes himself wise and who would be if… Gerard”. He then adds as a postscript: “Incidentally, here at Madame de Saint-Marcel’s I am addressed as M. Gérard de Nerval, because it is my wish.”

  Later, in letters to magazine editors, and to the director of the Beaux-Arts, he experiments with “L. Gérard de Nerval”, “G. Nap. délla torre Brunya” (an early reference to the “tour abolie” of his sonnet) and “Gérard L. de Nerval”. Only to his father does the signature always remain, “ton fils bien affectionné, G. Labrunie”. Thus in his public letter to Jules Janin that striking phrase “le tombeau vivant de Gérard de Nerval” takes on a particular importance, as the intended introduction of a new literary persona to his readership, in the final form of his new name.

  Its source is of course the Valois of his childhood. By adopting the name of his uncle’s paddock at Mortefontaine, the clos de Nerval, and using the aristocratic de (just as Balzac invented “Honoré de Balzac”), Nerval granted himself a new patronym and a new genealogy, full of romantic overtones. It was moreover a genealogy connected with his mother’s side of the family, for two of the Laurent grandparents had already been buried in the clos de Nerval in 1836. It is impossible not to detect in this some gesture of disinheritance—“El Desdichado”—towards his father, and the Labrunies of Aquitaine. Nerval was choosing to dig up and replant the very roots of his identity in the magic places of his earliest childhood. Eventually this was to influence the entire direction of his writing, and his final travels. In a certain sense, the asylum at Montmartre had seen a man called Labrunie die, and another man, called Nerval, born. But for me as a biographer this left a strange and unsettling question: which was the real one?

  Jules Janin himself must have been deeply perplexed. For with the public letter from Gérard de Nerval came a private one from Gérard Labrunie, and its passionate tones are unmistakably sincere. “My dear Janin,” it ran,

  excuse me for writing to you with some bitterness… but insert my letter [in the Débats] or at least quote and analyse it; for my complaint is just. I am as grateful to you as ever, but none the less deeply hurt at having to appear as a sublime madman, thanks to you, to Théophile, to Lucas, etc. I shall never be able to present myself in any society, never be able to get married, never be able to obtain a serious hearing. Repa
ir the evil by withdrawing your praises or frankly admitting your error! Print my letter, it must be done. I am counting on you.

  But Janin, the “friend of his heart”, never did so.

  Nerval’s crucial breakdown just before his voyage to the East had, therefore, at least three aspects: a medical or psychological one described as “Theomania”; a sociological one, in which he is the victim of the professional pressures of his uncertain career and the disapproval of his father; and a literary one, in which the breakdown of his old identity as G. Labrunie is really the prelude to his creation of a new author, Gérard de Nerval. All this was sufficiently complicated as it stood. But I gradually discovered there was a fourth interpretation, and this was Nerval’s own. He said he had been driven mad by his unrequited love for Jenny Colon, the actress who had starred in Piquillo. Or, at least, for the woman that Jenny represented. This was something entirely new to me.

  The part that Jenny, or her avatars, played in Nerval’s insanity was not revealed until the autobiographic work Aurélia, written in the last months of his life. No letters from Jenny to Nerval are known, nor is there any mention of her in any of the letters Nerval wrote from the asylum in 1841. It might therefore be natural to suppose that l’affaire Jenny was an invention of Nerval’s, dating from long after the event, or at least made into something imaginatively important only in retrospect. The biographical truth is hard to discern; and extraordinarily little is known of the woman herself.

  Jenny sang the lead in the 1837 production of Piquillo, and again in the production of December 1840 in Brussels which Nerval visited just before his breakdown. In the interval she had married a flautist in the theatrical company, a M. Leplus, and Nerval later said this had been a severe blow to him. He had admired her, he said, ever since 1834; and Le Monde Dramatique had been founded largely to further her career. Gautier also tells this story, though the fact remains that there was only one important profile of Jenny in the magazine, and this was written by Gautier himself, not Nerval.

  During 1837 Nerval sketched a series of love-letters which still exist in the form of sixteen rough manuscripts preserved in the library at Chantilly, which I was eventually to track down. Unfortunately none of these letters is addressed, and there is no evidence that Nerval ever actually delivered them. Gautier wrote: “The story of his love affair will always remain obscure. He launched the periodical and wrote articles in it to bring himself in contact with his idol. He wrote wonderful, passionate love-letters to her: but he can only have slipped them into the postbox of his own pocket…Did he ever declare his love to her openly? I do not know.”

  It is possible that, even at this stage, the whole thing was largely a literary game of Nerval’s, conceived à la Rousseau as an exercise in style and emotion. It is difficult otherwise to account for the fact that Nerval polished and adapted six of these love-letters for publication before going on his Eastern voyage; they appeared in the Christmas 1842 issue of a fashion magazine, La Sylphide, under the title of Un Roman à Faire, or, “A novel in progress”. Meanwhile the real Jenny Colon-Leplus had died in June 1842, “exhausted by child-bearing”, and was buried in the cemetery at Montmartre. But the “novel in progress” was to bear fruit in a different way, ten years later, in the story Octavie.

  Despite all this literary artifice, there is some evidence that Nerval’s passion for Jenny was genuine and even notorious in theatrical circles. In one of the oddest sidelights of the whole affair, there is a note of February 1841 from a journalist in Brussels which tells Nerval that his constant praises for Jenny in the Gazette des Théâtres have made the rest of the Piquillo company furiously jealous: “They are talking of drawing lots between the actors to choose who should come and stab you to death, in the manner of the secret societies.”

  A joke, no doubt. But it would have reached Nerval in Paris about a week before his breakdown.

  6

  Nerval’s Voyage en Orient was a voyage of inner self-exploration as much as one of recuperation and research. He said that he went east to forget his troubles and to renew himself, both physically and morally. He wrote to Dr Labrunie, who did not entirely approve of the expedition: “I had to leave all that behind me by some great enterprise which would efface the memory of it, and give me a new physiognomy in other people’s eyes.” But from Cairo he wrote ecstatically that “the sun is really brighter in these countries than our own. It is as if I had not seen a sun like this since my earliest childhood, when all our perceptions are more intense and fresh. Living here is almost like growing ten years younger.”

  Nerval remained in that city for three months, then took ship for Beirut, arriving there in mid-May. A further two months were spent in Lebanon, some of it travelling by mule in the desert, visiting the Druses and Maronite Christians. At the beginning of July he sailed again from Beirut, stopping off at the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus and at Smyrna before reaching Constantinople on 25 July. Here he remained for a further three months, delaying his departure so that he could stay for Ramadan. His travelling companion, Joseph Fonfrède, left him to return early to France, supposedly because of legal matters connected with his family. Nerval and Fonfrède seem to have got on excellently throughout, the younger man (Fonfrède was twenty-five) providing them with many colourful adventures, notably with a slave-girl he hired in Cairo. Nerval said her breasts were tattooed with images of the sun, and Gautier—true to form—later claimed that Nerval had promised to bring her back for him as a present. As “Zetnayb”, she became a central figure in the published Voyage en Orient. It is one of the great gaps in Nerval’s biography, however, that Fonfrède’s journal or letters were not preserved: few people could have got to know Nerval so well. Indeed, apart from some fragmentary “Notes de Voyage” Nerval’s own record of this entire year consist of some twenty letters written either to his father or to Gautier. This absence of documentation is itself vaguely disquieting, and no letters at all belong to the months spent in Lebanon.

  In the Voyage en Orient this period is largely covered by the strange “Legend of Calif Hakim”, an account of hashish-taking, madness and double identities which seems to have strong autobiographical overtones. The travel notes are full of revealing passages, though never more than fragmentary. In one place I found: “I feel the need to assimilate all Nature into myself (foreign women). Memory of having lived here before. Night of Vienna. To pursue the same features in many different women. Lover of an eternal type. Destiny … The actress who cheated him in all her roles. To the ends of the earth.”

  In another place, also unidentified, there was a passage which would be closely linked with the eventual accounts of his madness in Aurélia: “Dreams and madness. The red star. The desire for the East. Europe rises. The dream is realised. Seas. Confused memories … It is men who have made me suffer. A climate where my head may rest. Loves abandoned in a tomb. Her. I fled from her, I lost her, I made her great. Italy. Germany. Flanders. The boat to the East.”

  Here I felt I could again overhear Nerval’s inner voice, talking to himself, grief-struck and obsessive, muttering on and on in that eternal dialogue with the self that exists in all of us, but which must be constantly restrained if it is not to unhinge us from reality.

  Yet Nerval the travel-journalist remained as resourceful as ever. The posts between Paris and the East were slow and extremely unreliable, so he found a novel way to communicate with Gautier and maintain his new literary persona as Gérard de Nerval. On reaching Constantinople he had found in one of the French libraries a back-number of La Presse in which Gautier reviewed his own work, the ballet La Péri, in the form of an open letter, “To my friend Gérard de Nerval in Cairo”. Nerval immediately answered it by gaining access to the columns of a local paper, Le Journal de Constantinople, and writing a return article, “To my friend Théophile Gautier in Paris”, knowing that copies of this paper—“the best circulating news-sheet in the Bosphorus”—would travel far more quickly and safely than private correspondence. In fact Gautier
read this piece in Paris within three weeks, and it is one of Nerval’s finest and most evocative travel-letters, even though he modestly describes himself as “rusty”. Having whimsically filled in the local colour—British tourists wearing rubber mackintoshes, hashish-eaters swathed in striped Bedouin blankets and sinuous alma dancers who turn out to be male—Nerval delivers up a marvellous and ironic farewell to the Romantic illusions of Orientalists and the would-be pursuers of Eastern exotica:

  O my dear friend, how well we have acted out the fable of the two men: one who runs to the ends of the earth in pursuit of his fortune, and the other who tranquilly awaits it in his own bed at home! It’s not my fortune that I pursue, but the ideal—colour, poetry, love perhaps; yet all that comes to you, who have stayed behind, and escapes me, who has run without ceasing. Only once, being imprudent, you spoilt your ideal of Spain by going to see it… But I have already lost, kingdom by kingdom, province by province, the most beautiful half of the universe, and soon I shall not know any more where to seek a refuge for my dreams. But it is Egypt that I most regret having hunted from my imagination, to let it find sad lodgings in my memory! You still believe in the magic ibis, the purpled lotus, and the yellow Nile… Alas, the ibis is nothing but a desert bird, the lotus a vulgar onion plant, and the Nile a murky red river with slate-grey reflections.

  Nerval goes on to praise the Egypt that Gautier has created at the Paris Opera for his ballet—“the veritable Cairo, the immaculate Egypt, the East that has escaped me”—finally reversing the worlds of reality and of theatrical illusion in a paradoxical and nostalgic grande finale: