Perhaps these are only distorted glimpses of the Seine at night, with its bridges and barges, its steps and alleys; but I found something terrible in them, like the engravings of Piranesi’s imaginary prisons or the worst opium visions of de Quincey. They were travel-writings of a new kind: interior journeys, journeys through dreams and nightmares, and they seemed to portend Nerval’s final night in the backstreets round the dismal rue de la Vieille Lanterne. Yet Les Nuits is in many ways a light-hearted, diverting work, and in its opening section describes the path that Nerval had mapped out for his future promenades:
As time goes by, the passion for long and distant journeys fades, provided that one has not been travelling for so long that one becomes a foreigner in one’s own land. The circle of travel shrinks steadily, getting nearer and nearer to one’s home ground … I have grown fond of those little villages a dozen or so leagues outside the radiating centre of Paris, like modest planets. Ten leagues is far enough to ensure that you aren’t tempted to come back the same evening…
This shrinking of the circle was now to be Nerval’s pattern until the end. It was an inner shrinking too, for as his imagination withdrew from distant adventures he fastened on his own memories, and consumed himself until he feared nothing would be left. He wrote to George Bell, another of the friends who tried to support him in his extremity: “What I write at the moment turns too much in a tightened circle. I am feeding off my own substance, and do not renew myself.”
Les Nuits was published serially in L’Illustration during the winter of 1852, following which he was hospitalised for nearly two months in the Maison Dubois, a municipal hospital in the rue du faubourg Saint-Denis. The official diagnosis was “erysipelas”, a fever and general inflammation of the skin, sometimes known as St Anthony’s fire, and often associated with acute nervous disorders.
The alternating pattern of illness and creation became steadily more pronounced. In the early summer of 1853 Nerval travelled in the Valois and worked on Sylvie, which was published in the Revue des Deux-Mondes on 15 August. Exactly ten days later he was taken on as a long-term patient by Dr Emile Blanche at Passy, where he remained, with occasional remissions, until the spring of 1854. During one of the brief periods of lucidity he delivered several poems he had written to Alexandre Dumas who was now editing a magazine, Le Mousquetaire. Dumas published one of them in December.
It was the sonnet “El Desdichado”, the story of his life told in fourteen poised and noble lines, each phase of Nerval’s private sufferings transfigured into symbolic language, as if it were some great folk-myth of Romanticism. In the first section comes the disinheritance of the Hero, the loss of his visionary estates, the death of his beloved; in the second, the consoling memories of his great journeys, and the healing powers of nature; in the third, the questions of his identity and purpose, the fatal kiss of the Muse, and the perilous immersion in the seductive grotto of his dreams; and in the fourth and last, the epic attempts to swim the river of madness and death and the unceasing efforts to find eternal harmony in a universe divided by desire and renunciation, through the magic lute of Orpheus—the poet’s lyre of words, his only hope of salvation:
Je suis le Ténébreux,—le Veuf,—l’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie:
Ma seule ètoile est morte,—et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre a la Rose s’allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus?… Lusignan ou Biron?
Mon front est rouge encore du baiser de la Reine;
J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la Sirène…
Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron:
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.
Dumas accompanied this sonnet with a long editorial article, in which he mockingly described Nerval as feeding on dreams and visions like an opium-eater of Cairo.
Sometimes he believes he is Solomon, the King of the Orient, who awaits the Queen of Sheba; sometimes he believes he is the Sultan of Crimea, the Count of Abyssinia, or the Baron of Smyrna; and sometimes he simply believes he is a madman, and explains how he became so, but with such joy and enthusiasm that everyone else wants to become mad too and follow their fascinating guide through the Land of Chimeras, with its green oases far cooler and more shadowy and inviting than those on the dusty road from Alexandria to Ammon.
It was, in effect, the third mocking obituary that Nerval had received in his lifetime.
But Dumas also encouraged Nerval to think in terms of collecting together his scattered pieces of prose and poetry. This resulted in his two major volumes of 1854. The first was Les Filles du Feu, a linked anthology of eight prose pieces, including Sylvie, the essays “Chansons et Légendes du Valois” and “Isis” (concerning Egyptian mythology). There were also Octavie and Pandora, the two love-stories set in Naples and Vienna. The book was dedicated to Dumas in a long Preface, in which for the first time Nerval openly discusses his madness. The second volume was Les Chimères, a collection of seven mystic sonnets, including “El Desdichado”; and a sequence of five religious sonnets, Le Christ aux Oliviers, probably written in the Lebanon in 1843. These two books became Nerval’s most famous titles, and had they been properly recognised at the time would have assured his reputation and given him the peace of mind that alone might have saved him.
In fact Nerval was more restless and unstable than ever. He was working at another autobiographical work, the Promenades et Souvenirs, which describes the memories of childhood evoked by a series of short, probably therapeutic trips to other places round Paris—St Germain-en-Laye, Pontoise, Chantilly and Senlis. But the need to attempt a further “grand voyage” overcame him, and, despite the misgivings of Dr Blanche, in May 1854 he set out for Germany. This was to be his last major journey, taking him as far as Nuremberg and Leipzig, and possibly to Glogau where his mother was buried. It produced a sequence of some forty letters, mostly written to Dr Blanche and to Dr Labrunie, which are among the most revealing and tragic that he wrote. Here the tension between being “Gérard”, the wayward son, and “Gérard de Nerval”, the romantic travel-writer, becomes almost unbearable.
To his father he is reassuring, explanatory, serious and frequently sad; to Dr Blanche he is mercurial—cheerful or gloomy, teasing or apologetic, calm or exalted. To Dr Labrunie he writes: “My situation is good, though dependent on the future… My works are a capital which I shall increase, if it please God, and which after my death will be enough to acquit me towards mankind … Napoleon said that everything has to be paid for. It was Balzac who taught me this saying. And Balzac paid for everything in the end; he died honoré, as was his first name.”
To Dr Blanche he sends greetings and asks to be remembered to the lady patients at the asylum:
Explain to them that the pensive person they used to see drifting, morose and uneasy, through the day-room and the garden, or at your hospitable dining-table was assuredly not me. From the far side of the Rhine, I reject that double-dealer [sycophante] who stole my name and perhaps my face. When the ladies see me again, I hope I shall be worthier, wittier, more attentive and more seductive—more affectionate, I should say.
He admits to Dr Labrunie that his illness, “that is to say, my exalted states”, sometimes returns. “I am taken for a prophet (a false prophet), with my occasionally mysterious talk and my frequent air of distraction.” He has become well-known and much spoken of, “though thanks, it is true, to my misfortunes”. But he is better, and the proof is that he can write to his father “so easily and so logically”. His trip is doing him good, above all because it has allowed him much solitary reflection “about other people and about myself, and the time to make “g
ood resolutions”. Yet though he can write logically to his father it is only to Blanche that he writes emotionally. His letters to Blanche often make him cry as he writes: “My heart aches in thinking of you, and of my father. Write back to me what I must do, because I suffer deeply, and from the bottom of my heart. If there is always a last moment to repent, well then, I repent! But I am still walking in the darkness, and it is your answer and counsel that I am waiting for.”
He tries to put things—his whole life—right with his father, but he can only do so stiffly, and formally: “I want you to be perfectly at ease concerning me, but I reproach myself bitterly for all the anxiety that I have so often given you. At last I see clearly that one must give up the ideas of one’s youth, and try to make oneself a position appropriate to one’s age and abilities.”
What does this mean—changing, or giving up? His whole writing career, perhaps? Nerval does not say; Gérard does not say. But to Blanche he is more heart-felt, and more desperate. He admits that he has written to his father, “affecting a calm that I don’t really have”. His visions have begun again, and he doubts if he will ever be able to attain “the peace and the future that you speak to me of”. His writing projects were serious ones, “and still are serious”. But he will come home, because “now I count on being better at Paris”.
Contrary to what I expected, there is virtually nothing in these letters about his mother. “My principal torment in my moments of solitude,” he writes to Blanche, “has always been the thought of my father. Don’t imagine that I tell you this to soften you in my favour. But the evils that I have made him suffer continually weigh upon my heart. If I should be destined to act out the most painful expiation that could be imagined I would willingly submit to it, for this reason alone.”
Dr Blanche must have seen this as a veiled threat of suicide, but he could do little except urge his patient to return to Paris. Nerval’s sense of guilt towards his father had become one more element in the growing mythology of his own life. Blanche knew equally that Nerval still blamed his father for not supporting his literary career. These contradictions formed part of the complex pattern—soon to be developed in Aurélia—which expressed Nerval’s fundamental sense of abandonment, going right back to his mother’s tomb in “cold Silesia”. Blanche’s kindly letters of reply could not reassure him.
No letters from Dr Labrunie are known, and I also looked in vain for a letter to or from Gautier. There was something of a further mystery here, for in these last months references to Nerval’s oldest friend become surprisingly scarce. Those there are have an unexpected tone of bitterness. Writing to George Bell from Strasbourg Nerval mentions that he has offended his “best friend” by describing him somewhat hyperbolically in memoirs of the Doyenné, Les Petits Châteaux de Bohème. “I thought I had made an Adonis of him,” protests Nerval. In fact he had compared Gautier to an Indian Bacchus, and described him as putting on weight (both of which descriptions were just). In another letter from Leipzig he asks the publisher Sartorius simply to pass on his news to Gautier: “I have a travel-letter for him but it will be published, dated from Karlsruhe, and I don’t want to waste more copy in writing private letters.”
That their friendship had been reduced, apparently, to this cold professionalism suggested that something had gone very wrong. The newspaper letter from Karlsruhe was never written, and the last known note from Nerval to Gautier is a formal introduction of a newspaper colleague sometime in autumn 1854. It is signed “Gérard de Nerval”, a signature which Nerval had never used to his friend before, and is virtually a gesture of hostility.
I puzzled over this for many weeks until I finally found the sad solution in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Nadar’s notebooks. That Nerval felt exploited by Gautier was clear to me: it is a central thread in his story, though Nerval surely had greater cause to blame his “undertaker critics”, Janin, Champfleury and Dumas. But perhaps he forgave them more readily as they were, after all, primarily professional friends, and the damage they had done was inextricably involved in the creation of his public persona as Nerval.
But Gautier was a friend—the friend—of his youth, un ami de coeur, almost his brother. Gautier, it must have seemed, was guilty of a family betrayal; a failure to love him and support him comparable to the failure of his father. How far Nerval was justified in thinking like this was difficult to establish objectively. But the consequence was one of those tragic actions of Nerval’s madness which gave me the sense of having lost his true identity in the labyrinth of his delusions. The incident probably occurred in 1853, and it is told in a single-sentence aside by Nadar. The fact that Nadar never referred to it again, in any of his published writings, paradoxically convinced me of its authenticity. He wrote: “The door of my dear friend Théophile Gautier was closed forever to [Gérard], by the memory of a knife-blade drawn against him in one of those outbursts of demented fury.”
I read this with a cold shock, that nothing else in Nerval’s life had produced. He had actually tried to kill his old friend. It is one of those actions that challenges one’s whole notion of a person’s character. More and more I felt I was following Nerval into the dark, and had lost him on that inner journey.
By 1854, Nerval was already the subject of a published biography by the hack Eugène de Mirecourt, a copy of which he discovered in a library at Strasbourg before coming back to Paris. It was accompanied by an engraved portrait, possibly based on an unknown daguerreotype, on which Nerval drew a pentangle against enchantment, and wrote “Je suis l’autre”, a formula which antedates Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” by thirty years. His growing sense of being two people, already clear in his correspondence with Dr Blanche, comes out with apparent naturalness in his description of the biography to his father:
I am presented like the hero of a novel, and the whole pamphlet is full of exaggerations, no doubt well-meaning, and incorrect facts, though these are of very little importance, since the whole thing describes a conventional “personality” … One can’t stop people talking, and this is how history gets written. All of which goes to prove that I have done well to keep my imaginative life [vie poétique] and my real life apart.
Nerval eventually returned to Paris in July 1854, full of good intentions. “How often I have planned to reform my life,” he told his father, “but never more seriously than now.” To Dr Blanche he wrote from Bar-le-Duc, “I still hope to show myself worthy of your care.” He had a little less than seven months to live.
In the mass of unreliable and picturesque anecdotage that surrounds these last months, three dates are of outstanding importance. On 19 October 1854 Nerval voluntarily released himself from Dr Blanche’s care at Passy, claiming that he would stay with a relative at Saint-Germain. On 1 January 1855 the first part of Aurélia was published in the Revue de Paris, finally making his madness public property in the literary world. And at dawn on 26 January, Nerval’s body was found hanging by a piece of kitchen cord from the bars of a grilled ventilation window, halfway down the steps of the alley leading to the Seine known as the rue de la Vieille Lanterne.
According to Gautier, the partially corrected proofs of part two of Aurélia were in Nerval’s jacket pocket. The mortuary records, which have been found, do not confirm this story, though they show that Nerval had no topcoat on despite the fact that it was a snowy night with a temperature of minus eighteen degrees. There was no suicide note, though everyone who knew Nerval well—including Gautier, Nadar, Stadler, and Dr Blanche himself—agreed that he died by his own hand. The second part of Aurélia was duly published in the Revue de Paris in February, creating a sensation; and Gautier carefully edited a version for book publication—adding the “Letters to Jenny Colon” of 1837—which appeared later that summer under the title Le Rêve et la Vie. Gérard Labrunie had finally passed into the “vie poétique” and legend of Gérard de Nerval.
Writing officially to the Archbishop of Paris—there were clerical complications whether a suicide
could be buried in the consecrated ground of Père Lachaise—Dr Emile Blanche gave the following summary of the case:
M. Labrunie (Gérard de Nerval), aged forty-five, a man of letters born in Paris, had been seized on repeated occasions during these last years with an attack of mental alienation for which both my father and I gave him treatment… On 19 October 1854, at his own insistence, I released him into the care of his aunt, Madame Labrunie. She was forewarned by me that M. Gérard was still in need of a degree of surveillance, and on this basis she agreed to take him in and look after him. In truth, M. Gérard de Nerval was not so ill that he could be held, against his will, in a lunatic asylum. Yet as far as I was concerned he had not been sane for a long time. Believing that he retained the same energy of imagination and the same capacity for work, he thought he could live on the earnings of his literary output, as before. He worked harder than ever, but perhaps he was disappointed in his hopes? His independent nature and his self-respect prevented him from accepting financial aid, even from his most tried and trusted friends. Under the influence of these moral pressures [causes morales] his reason was steadily undermined. But it was above all because he saw his madness face to face. I do not hesitate therefore to inform you, My Lord, that it was certainly in an extreme attack of madness that M. Gérard de Nerval put an end to his days.
As I read this calm, carefully worded medical statement, which succeeded in blaming no one for the tragedy, one ironic detail struck me. Blanche uses three different names to describe his patient. Even Nerval’s own doctor did not know what to call Gérard at the end. What chance had his biographer?
8
This is not a rhetorical question. Nerval’s story, as I have recounted it, makes a superficial sense, and the outlines of a personality emerge to some degree. He was a brilliantly gifted writer, a modest and charming man, but so deeply wounded in his private life that he was never able to settle down and establish himself—either domestically or professionally. The rootlessness of his condition in many ways represents the larger transformation that was painfully coming over the whole of Europe since the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. France was changing from a traditional to a modern, industrialised society, with its popular press, its railways and steamships, its banking and commerce and its increasingly materialistic values. The spirit of Romanticism was being overcome by Realism, like a candle being carried into a room fitted with electric light. One is tempted to say that, had Nerval been born earlier, he would have been saved by religion; had he been born later, he would have been saved by psychoanalysis.
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