Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  The works of the Pharaoh, the califs and the sultans have disappeared almost entirely beneath the dust of the khamsin [south wind] and the hammers of a prosaic civilisation. But beneath your enchanted gaze, O magician, their reanimated ghost rises up once more with its gardens, its palaces, and its ideal—well, almost—péris! It is this Egypt that I believe in, and not the other one. The six months that I spent in the other Egypt have slipped silently away: already lost in a non-existent world [le néant], I have seen so many countries fall away into the darkness behind me, like so many wooden theatrical sets. What will be left to me?—nothing but an image as confused as something one has dreamed.

  Gautier would have liked all that, the romantic dreams and the fashionable world-weariness, and the continuing mythology of their collaboration—the Gemini, the “two men in the fable”, acting out the story of their lives. It was also flattering—“O magician!”—using exactly the same form of compliment that Baudelaire would use a decade later in dedicating the Fleurs du Mal to Gautier, “au parfait magicien es lettres françaises”. And of course there was the blazoned signature with the dateline, Constantinople: Gérard de Nerval.

  Yet Nerval did not take all “trop au sérieux”, as he explained in a letter of October to his father. It was, he said, “one paradox in answer to another”, and the sort of thing that was expected by the newspaper public in these kinds of “jeux d’esprit”. He did not really feel like that about Egypt and Lebanon. His attitude was much more practical and down to earth: what really counted was Gautier’s kindness in dedicating his ballet to him publicly, so to speak, through La Presse, and giving publicity to his voyage: “I feel this all the more since my illness was only too well known, and it is vital that my return to health should be publicly noticed. Nothing can prove it better than this difficult journey through the hot countries of the East.”

  So the split personality—Gérard and Nerval—remains in evidence.

  Nerval left Constantinople at the end of October 1843, returning via Malta and Naples, where he stayed for a fortnight renewing his memories of 1834. The significance of this last stop-over was lost on me at first. He passed Christmas at Nîmes in the family of his old friend from the Doyenné days, Camille Rogier, finally returning to Paris in the first week of the New Year 1844, where there was a moving but uneasy reunion with his father. Now there lay ahead the long task of working up his notes and impressions, reading up on every aspect of Eastern customs and religion and slowly drafting the three long studies of Cairo, Beirut and Constantinople which would be serially published, and then eventually become the definitive version of his book, Scènes de la Vie Orientale, provocatively entitled, “Les Femmes de Caire”, “Les Femmes de Liban” and “Les Nuits du Ramazan”.

  The whole process took six long and increasingly difficult years. Far from establishing his return to health and “normality”, it gave him an increasingly eccentric reputation as the Last of the Romantic Travellers, the dreamer and “initiate”, the man who had “gone East” and never quite come back. Once again it was Gautier who summed up, and brilliantly exploited, this new persona:

  From the mists of Germany Gérard de Nerval passed into the blazing sunshine of Egypt… Coptic marriages, Arabian wedding feasts, evenings among the Opium Eaters, the customs of the Egyptian fellaheen: all the details of the Mohammedan world are caught with the same sensitivity and acuteness of observation … His chapters entitled “The Legend of Calif Hakim” and “The Story of Balkis and Solomon” show the extraordinary degree to which he had succeeded in penetrating the profoundly mysterious spirit of these strange tales, in which each object contains a symbol. One could even say that he took from them certain occult meanings intended only for the neophyte, certain cabalistic formulae and overtones of the Illuminati, which made one believe, at times, that he was writing directly of his own personal initiation. I would not be altogether surprised if, like Jacques Cazotte, the author of the Diable Amoureux, he had received a visit from some stranger making Masonic signs, who was quite confounded not to find in him a true member of the Secret Brotherhood.

  Cazotte, incidentally, was arrested and guillotined during the Revolution.

  Gautier is the first to make the link between Nerval’s physical travels and his metaphysical ones: the implication is that he has journeyed through mysticism into madness, through the Orient into insanity, though typically the conclusion is turned away as a joke. Nerval was not really a member of the Brotherhood, just a bright fellow-journalist. But was he?

  During these middle years of Nerval’s life the solid ground began to slip away beneath my feet as a biographer. The “Eastern star” that is calling Nerval seemed to get a progressively deeper hold on his psyche—the symbol of his travels, or the symbol of his lost love, or the symbol of his dreams and madness. The 17th card of the Tarot pack shows a naked woman pouring water into a sacred river, beneath a night sky of huge hypnotic stars.

  So I too began star-gazing. From my attic room, I found I could climb out on to the little ironwork balcony six floors above the street, and by standing on the top rail reach up to the guttering and pull myself on to the steeply sloping slate roof. Here I would establish myself on a flat stone platform between the chimney-pots. From this vantage point I gazed eastwards up the rue d’Hauteville, as the long summer evenings yielded their stars. The darkness thickened over the distant roofs and tufted TV aerials while the top section of the architrave of the gare de l’Est shone on the horizon, its Second Empire frieze of allegorical gods and goddesses—L’Industrie, Le Commerce, L’Agriculture—lit from below by hidden lamps, so they hung strangely yellow and illuminated against the deepening black of the sky. I read again and again Nerval’s accounts of his first breakdown in 1841 (from the various drafts of Aurélia) describing how he had left the cafe Lepeletier after talking excitedly of “music, painting, the generation of colours and numbers”, and rushed into the rue d’Hauteville telling his friends he was going “to the East”:

  And I began to search in the sky for a Star that I thought I knew, as if she had a particular power over my destiny. Having found her, I continued my walk following the streets in the direction in which she was visible, hanging there, and moving so to speak ahead of my fate, and wishing to have my eye on her at the very moment that death struck me down … Here began for me what I shall call the overflowing of dreams into real life.

  Here at last began for me too the overflowing of the irrational into the normal forms of biography. All the logical and traditional structures that I had learned so painstakingly—the chronology, the development of character, the structure of friendships, the sense of trust and the subject’s inner identity—began to twist and dissolve. It was becoming more and more difficult to tell, or to account for, Nerval’s life in the ordinary narrative, linear way. Sometimes it seemed that those haunting Tarot cards—La Lune, L’Etoile, La Tour—expressed much more about him than any critical commentary.

  There was a ludicrous incident on the roof that I afterwards connected with this growing realisation. Studying my eastward stars one night, I stepped backwards to bring a constellation clear of a distant tower—I think it was the church tower of Saint Vincent-de-Paul, in the place Liszt. Suddenly I became aware that I was standing on nothing but a bright square of transparent light. It was as if the dark roof had flicked aside like a camera-shutter, and my feet were resting on a lens of sunlight shining up from beneath. I hung there like the man in the cartoon who steps over a cliff without realising it. Then there was a sharp crack, the skylight folded in on itself, and I dropped like a condemned man from the scaffold. I landed in a roar of plastic curtain on the springy floor of the shower-cabinet below, perfectly unhurt and shaking like a leaf. The skylight glass was not broken, but the frame had collapsed inward on its hinges. My imperturbable friend and landlord sorted me out from the wreckage. All I remember him saying was, “Tiens, tu descends assez vite de tes contemplations.” We drank stiff whiskies and worked out the repair bill. B
ut I was shaken more than I could say; it was not only a skylight that had given way.

  Nerval’s Voyage en Orient, definitively published in 1851 when he was forty-three, was intended as the proof of his sanity, his claim to the literary recognition of his peers. Yet already his troubles had started again, and his whole attitude towards the nature of his travels was deeply ambiguous. Even on the boat sailing homeward from Malta to Naples, at the very time he was assuring his father of the practical solidity of his achievement, he had emphasised the inward, mystic quality of his experience in a letter to Jules Janin.

  “In sum,” he wrote, “the East bears no comparison with that waking dream I had two years ago; or rather, the East of that dream is further away and higher. I have had enough of running after poetry; now I believe that it is to be found on your own doorstep, and perhaps in your own bed. I am still the man who runs over the earth, but I am going to try to stop myself, and to wait…”

  Nerval had worked immensely hard during these intervening years. He had written a series of six long biographical essays, on the eccentric and occult figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, including Jacques Cazotte, Cagliostro, and the expert of the Paris night, Restif de la Bretonne. These were collected in 1852 under the title of Les Illuminés, which has for its general theme the decline of religious and magical beliefs in France, a subject dear to his heart. He had also written a pioneering study of French ballads and folklore, “Chansons et Légendes du Valois”, which shows a profound understanding of the old musical and magical roots of poetic inspiration. Here he applied his gift for travel-writing on a place close to home, so that the Valois itself becomes a mysterious land, shrouded in mists and legends, though it was now a there half an hour away on the newly constructed chemin de fer du Nord that Nerval so detested.

  More painfully, Nerval had also turned back to the theatre, with delusive hopes of popular success. In 1847 he had worked on an opera, Les Monténégrins, which had a short and unsuccessful run at the Opéra-Comique in April 1849. He fell ill immediately afterwards, perhaps with memories of Piquillo, and spent a few ill-omened weeks in the care of another physician, Dr Aussandon. However, he recovered bravely, and was able to take over Gautier’s post as dramatic critic on La Presse during the summer weeks while his friend was pursuing a romantic liaison in London. The following May, 1850, a further theatrical collaboration with Joseph Méry, Le Chariot d’Enfant, also failed, and again Nerval spent some time in the care of Dr Aussandon. It seems strange that none of his friends, and particularly Gautier, took him aside at this time and persuaded him to leave the theatre well alone.

  After a short trip in Germany, as far as Leipzig, Nerval returned with the idea for a third drama, L’Imagier de Harlem, a modern retelling of the Faust story, which he intended for the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre in the autumn of 1851. Overwhelmed with work—besides L’Imagier he was also trying to complete the last of the essays for Les Illuminés, which had overrun its deadline for the Revue des Deux-Mondes—Nerval suffered a bad fall down one of the street-steps in Montmartre, wounding his chest against an iron banister, almost certainly during one of his manic phases. It was at sunset, within sight of Montmartre cemetery, and he says he was thinking of Jenny Colon. It was from this fall, on 24 September 1851, that Nerval himself dates the return of his madness in Section Nine of Aurélia.

  Now, for the first time for ten years, Nerval returned to the clinic of Dr Blanche. The institution had moved from Montmartre to the other side of Paris at Passy, to occupy the one-time Hôtel de la Princesse de Lamballe set in a large garden at No 2 rue de Seine. Direction of the clinic had been handed over by Dr Esprit Blanche to his son Emile, a man some years younger than Nerval himself, who would prove the most gifted psychotherapist of his generation. Among Dr Emile Blanche’s most distinguished artistic patients besides Nerval would be the composer Gounod and Guy de Maupassant. For the next four years Nerval was a regular patient at the clinic, and the relationship he formed with the younger Blanche became one of the most important in his life. Blanche helped Nerval fulfil himself as a writer more than any other person except Gautier; he provided a stable friendship that was part parental and part brotherly; and he gave Nerval the nearest thing to a home that he had had since the Doyenné days.

  Certainly the world outside had become cruel. L’Imagier de Harlem was a failure, despite an impassioned plea which Nerval sent to Jules Janin for his critical support on the eve of the production. Janin’s review was hostile and other critics were starting to write his obituary again. Jules Champfleury, the future champion of Realism, had already composed an article in May 1849 which professed to foresee Nerval’s literary fate:

  Gérard’s name is marked in red in the dossiers of the undertaker critics who do so well at funeral speeches and the suicides of their colleagues. When he is dead, Gérard will be a Great Writer. They will lay the blame on society, or the Government. “Poor Gérard! What a beautiful spirit!” etc. But while Gérard is still living he passes unnoticed. The critics who will in future pour crocodile tears over the Scènes de la Vie Orientales have not a word to say at present. They await the obituaries.

  It was meant satirically, but the blade was double-edged, and must have wounded Nerval deeply.

  His collaborator Joseph Méry recalled how, one day soon after the failure of the Imagier, Nerval came to visit him and broke out into bitter, almost hysterical laughter: ‘“There is only one play that ever succeeds in Paris. It’s been seen for thirty years, and the public wants to go on seeing it. You take a mother and her son—Act I, the son is lost; Act V the son is found again. The mother cries—my son! The son cries—mother! The audience bursts into tears, and the dramatist receives a cloudburst of money.’”

  Did Méry see the full psychological significance of this cry of fury and disappointment, or understand the reference to the son and the mother? He only notes that Nerval ran out of the apartment and down the stairs, saying he never wanted to see Méry again.

  “Gérard, why ever not?”

  “Because you tried to console me,” came the reply.

  It was the end of his theatrical ambitions and all hope of popular success.

  7

  But at the very moment that Nerval saw his public career founder, he entered into the final and most brilliantly original phase of his autobiographical writing. Freed from newspaper criticism and dramatic scripts, he reverted to his first and most natural form—what I came to think of as his promenades. Rousseau invented this term to describe the occasional or confessional essays he produced in his last years. Nerval’s promenades are all essentially short pieces of travel-writing, none of them more than fifty pages, but each developed in a completely individual way—as short stories, critical essays, personal memoirs, studies of myth or customs or frankly confessional pieces. In fact often he mixes these forms, combining romance with autobiography or sliding a personal reminiscence into a scholarly or descriptive passage. What remains constant is the voice of the narrator, the voice of Gérard de Nerval, the traveller telling his tale and recounting his most private thoughts and reflections.

  The finest of these promenades is the love-story of his childhood and adolescence, Sylvie, subtitled Souvenirs du Valois. It recounts a series of return journeys to Mortefontaine, layering one memory on top of another in a complex time-scheme greatly admired by Proust. It forms a pastoral romance, evoking the country manners of the Valois villages, in a way that attaches it to the classic prose of the French eighteenth century, like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. Yet its psychology, and its symbolic structure, are so subtle and modern as to appear almost contemporary, reminding one of nothing so much as a film such as Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.

  Sylvie was not the first of this masterly series of promenades, nor the last. It was not, in other words, an exceptional production—as Gautier was inclined to suggest—struck off in the failing light of Nerval’s sanity. On the contrary, it formed part of a regular cycle
of creative periods which alternated with the worst months of manic hallucinations and prostrating illness. To begin with, not all these took Nerval to the asylum at Passy. Sometimes his friends were still able to cope. At the beginning of 1852 he spent some weeks with Gautier at the rue de Navarin; and at the end of the year there are notes between Nadar and another friend, Eugène de Stadler, showing that they took turns to sit up all night with Nerval. An unpublished notebook entry of Nadar’s, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, describes Nerval being cared for by Stadler: “I can still recall that small, high bedroom in a fourth-storey flat in the place Pigalle, the full summer sun flowing in with asphyxiating heat, and Stadler’s only bed; I shall always see before me the good Samaritan rubbing [Nerval] all over with a greyish ointment, his body like a living corpse, in a bath of sweat…”

  Between these attacks of 1852 Nerval managed to write Les Nuits d’Octobre, describing three nights of walking round the backstreets of Paris, including Montmartre, Les Halles and Pantin; and a train journey out to Meaux. The style here is humorous and sometimes surreal, as with the fair at Meaux, where “a very fine woman with merino sheep fleece for hair” is on display at a side-show. There is a hallucinatory section, entitled “Capharnaum”:

  Corridors—corridors without end! And staircases—staircases which go up, or go down, or go up again, and which always end sunk in deep black water, whipped up by wheels, beneath the immense arches of a bridge… seen through a mass of inextricable wooden scaffolding! I climb them, I descend them, I run through the corridors—all this for several eternities. Is it the punishment to which I have been condemned for my faults? I would rather live!!! But instead—my head is being hit with great hammer blows. What does it all mean?