Aurélia is full of thoughts of death, but most of these belong to the hallucinations of the 1850s: “When I reached the place de la Concorde, my idea was to kill myself. Several times I went down towards the Seine, but something stopped me from carrying out my plan. The stars shone in the firmament.”
I did eventually find the strangest premonition of his hanging, dating from the first breakdown of 1841. It occurred, of all places, in Gautier’s drawing-room in the rue de Navarin. Nerval had dined tranquilly with Gautier and the editor Alphonse Karr, but he could feel the evil moment coming, and he tried to ward it off with one of his occult talismen:
I asked one of my friends for an oriental ring that he had on his finger, which I regarded as an ancient charm, and taking a silk scarf I knotted it round my neck, taking care to turn the stone of the ring, which was made of turquoise, on the exact point of my neck at which I could feel the pain. This point, as I thought, was the place from where my soul was in danger of leaving my body, at the instant that a particular ray of light from the star I had seen the evening before formed an astrological conjunction with the zenith.
In a sense, this is exactly what happened fourteen years later.
But I could go further back than 1841. I found in the story Octavie that Nerval claimed to have made a suicide attempt in Italy, during his very first journey of 1834. It had occurred on the Posilippo, that high cliff above the sea outside Naples which is associated with the prophetic cave of the Sibyl and also the tomb of Virgil, the first great classical poet who journeyed to the Underworld. These references fill the poems of the Chimères at the end of Nerval’s life:
Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie…
So it was obvious that these formed a symbolic and biographical conjunction of critical importance in his life. Moreover, it was Octavie that had the most continuous history of manuscript revisions in all Nerval’s work. Tracing the text backward (for now all my thinking about Nerval was concentrated on reverse time, le temps perdu) the incident appeared in the following sequence: lastly, in the Filles du Feu of 1854; previously in Dumas’s magazine Le Mousquetaire of 1853; then in Gautier’s magazine L’Artiste in 1845, under the title “L’Illusion”; then as Letter Three in the Roman à Faire published in La Sylphide in 1842; and earliest of all in a rough manuscript sketch of 1837, which was held in the great Lovenjoul Library at Chantilly. Each version saw various changes and expansions of the original incident, and I thought that if I could track down the very first version I might be in possession of the key to Nerval’s suicide, and thus to his whole tragedy.
I took a train to Chantilly one burning hot morning at the end of August, my final promenade.
Chantilly, with its polished racecourse between two elegant straight streets, like an emerald in an L-shaped golden mount, has suffered perhaps the least of all the country towns of the Valois. Tradition and modernity have come to a compromise, with the Due du Condé’s great château in its lake full of lazing carp at one end of town, the railway station at the other. The tree-lined boulevards are very quiet except on racing days, though ancient gentlemen in mohair suits and gold-topped canes still help beautiful young ladies in Liberty-print dresses out of Paris-registered Mercedes and Rolls-Royces. “Voilà, Angélique … nous-voici Hélène,” they sigh, with tight moneyed smiles.
The Duc’s stables, themselves as big as a castle, stand by the northern gate on the edge of the racecourse; and Spoelberch de Lovenjoul’s library—a seventeenth-century country house with a little gravelled courtyard that Nerval would have loved—draws back into the cool shadows, almost anonymous, a few hundred metres into the town. The hotels and restaurants are many and expensive, so I wandered about as in the old days, waiting for fate to direct me.
Nerval beautifully evokes the place, comparing it to one of “those old aristocratic gentlemen with impeccable white shirt and faultless manners, whose proud demeanour covers a worn hat or well-darned clothes … Everything is proper, well-ordered, circumspect; and voices fill the high, sonorous rooms with harmonious echoes.” An old concierge, sleeping in the sun with her dog near the château gates, told me of a place called Les Fontaines, beyond the southern limits of the town in a small wood, where I might find a bed for the night. It turned out to be a Jesuit retreat-house, set on the edge of a small lake, with conference rooms, kitchens, library and a long corridor of guest bedrooms, each with an iron bedstead, a writing-table and a wooden crucifix. I knew they would take me the moment I walked up the drive and saw the brothers hauling logs out of the woods. In ten years I had simply come full circle, and was walking back to La Trappe in another incarnation.
“We are giving a retreat for missionary nuns, and a conference on ‘Les Routards’,” the Guestmaster told me when I had explained what I was doing. He was a thin, intense man, dressed in the battered black suit of the Jesuit priest, with a yellowish complexion that suggested many years spent in the tropics. He chain-smoked with a hand that tremored slightly. “But we have a cancellation, and you can have a bed for a week if you want it.” Behind him on the wall of his office was a world map, showing the concentrations of poverty and malnutrition. “You look tired after your researches. This may be a place for you to rest and reflect. Religious denominations do not interest us. Every traveller has his needs.”
He took me to my cell, down the long corridor of pungent coconut matting, and told me the meal times. Going out of the door he stopped, and a gentle smile broke over his worn face. “Your Gérard de Nerval travelled a lot in Germany, I believe.” He hesitated for a moment. “You are a historian, and you will appreciate the ironies of history. The Jesuit order purchased Les Fontaines very cheaply, in 1946. It used to belong to the Rothschilds. But during the war it was occupied by the German army, and it became the local headquarters of the police. That is to say, of the Gestapo. So after the war nobody wanted it. That was why the Jesuits bought it very cheaply, in the material sense.” He hesitated again. “But in the spiritual sense…” The Guestmaster shook his head. “Now our guests come from all over Europe, and we try to help them, whoever they are. So you are very welcome. Our fountain flows. I hope you find what you are looking for.”
Every morning for a week I walked to the Lovenjoul Library from the woods of Les Fontaines. The heat shimmered above the trees, and along the racecourse huge lawn-sprinklers played, their fans of water throwing up languorous rainbows of sparkling light. I found two manuscripts that concluded my researches. The first was a long travel-letter from Gautier, which described a trip he made to Italy in the summer of 1851, when Nerval’s madness was beginning again. It was entitled “La Lettre à la Présidente”—La Présidente being Madame Sabatier, the famous courtesan who had been on various occasions the mistress of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Gautier, among others. The letter was a gross parody of all Nerval’s delicate, amorous travel-writing; it was jocular and entirely obscene:
The other evening Louis and I were visited by a young Venetian beauty, who having completed a number of preliminaries to satisfy herself that we were not police informers lifted up her dress and unhooped her stays, to allow us to run our eyes over her naked charms. Her breasts proceeded to explode into the room, crash straight through the floor, burst out into the via Condotti down the Corso as far as the piazza Venezia, leaving us smothered in an avalanche of “lilies and roses” in the style of Dupaty…
The second was Nerval’s letter of 1837, describing the night he first made love to a woman. The love-making goes without a word, and the story really begins the following dawn in Naples: “I tore myself away from this phantom who seduced and terrified me at the same time. I wandered through the deserted town, with the sound of the first church bells. Then, feeling the coming dawn, I took to the little streets behind Chiaia, and I began to climb the Posilippo above the grotto.”
I worked slowly on this manuscript, comparing all six versions. Each evening I walked back along the raceco
urse, and dined at Les Fontaines with the missionary nuns, in a room full of small, polished wooden tables. The scrubbed faces of the nuns, framed in their starched wimples, glowed above the jugs of water filled with roses, as they told me of their homes—mostly in the Auvergne and the south and Aquitaine—and their missionary stations in the deserted regions of Chad and the Sudan. They had been away for seven years, and after this one summer at home they were going back again for another seven. Their devotion was simple and brisk; and heart-breaking.
In the later versions of his manuscript Nerval slowly turns the figure of his Neapolitan woman into a gypsy fortune-teller or sorceress. Her room becomes filled with mystical objects—the statue of a black madonna, ancient pictures showing the Four Elements “represented by mythological divinities”, Etruscan vases and artificial flowers, old books on divination, dreams and the Tarot. But in the original version she is simply a woman who earns her living by embroidering vestments for the church.
It became clear to me that this beautiful, anonymous woman of the South had gradually been transformed in Nerval’s mind—during the twenty years of his wandering, dreaming, searching life after 1834—into the embodiment of everything he had hoped love would give back to him, in return for what he had originally lost as a child. She was his mother, she was Jenny Colon the actress, she was the “big blonde” of his trips with Gautier, she was the slave-girl Zetnyab, she was the Goddess Isis, she was the Virgin Mary of his last consoling visions in the madhouse. Yet what she had finally brought him was—nothing, le néant, metaphysical emptiness, the sense of his own hopelessly divided and outcast self: the shadow man, the widowed man, the unconsoled child and lover.
His story in the 1837 manuscript unfolds indeed with almost childlike simplicity:
When I had reached the top [of Posilippo] I walked along looking down at the deep blue sea, the town with its early-morning noises still within earshot, and the two islands of Ischia and Nisita out in the bay where the sun was just beginning to touch the tops of the villas with gold. Tiredness was the last thing in the world that I felt… I paced along with big strides, I began to run, I rushed down the slopes, I rolled over and over in the damp grass. But in my heart I had the thought of death.
This sudden revelation is shocking, not because it is unexpected but because it seems like a second voice, the voice of the other, bursting out in Nerval’s heart, never to be silenced again. The manuscript continues:
O God, I do not know what deep sadness was living in my soul, but it was nothing less than the cruel conviction that I was not loved. I had glimpsed the ghost of happiness, I had used up all the gifts of God, I was beneath the most beautiful sky in the world, in the presence of the most perfect Nature, and in sight of the greatest panorama that a man might live to see. Yet I was four hundred leagues from the only woman who had ever existed for me, and who still did not even know my name. Not to be loved, and never to have the hope of being loved! The unknown woman who had presented your image to me in vain, and who had served me for the chance encounter of an evening, she had loves of her own, her own interests, her own life; so she had given me all the pleasures that can exist—except for feeling and for love. And if love was missing, it all meant nothing.
If love was missing, it all meant nothing. This was the central revelation of his Naples experience, and it must have remained as the wound in his heart, the fracture in his brain, the unbearable confusion in his imagination, which he had spent half a lifetime trying to heal, to mend, to harmonise. This was why his Star was dead, his Tower fallen. Now I saw him, sharp as a figure on a bright and empty horizon, the Romantic Hero lost beneath the freezing Moon of his own entranced imagination. No parent, no friend, no lover could save him. And no biographer could come to his aid, could finally reach him through the bright cruel space of time.
The manuscript ends with his first act of suicide, an act that was not completed for another twenty years; so that his whole life could be seen as one long suspended act of falling:
It was then that I was tempted to go to God, that I might demand the account on my incomplete existence. There was only a single step to take. At the place where I stood, the hillside was cut away like a cliff, with the sea groaning at its foot, blue and pure. There was no more than a moment to suffer. Oh how terrible was the dizziness of that thought! Two times I threw myself forward, and I do not know what power flung me back, still alive, onto the grass which I kissed. No, my God, you have not created me for eternal suffering. I do not wish to outrage you with my own death. But give me the strength, give me the energy, give me above all the resolution, which helps some to power, some to fame, and some—to love.
I left Paris later that autumn, as the last leaves were being swept along the quai. My kindly landlord had married, and my attic room had to be repapered for the expected baby. I wrote my life of Gérard de Nerval, four hundred pages of it, entitled A Dream Biography. But it was a confused production, beginning with Nerval’s death and ending with Gerard’s birth, and wisely no publisher ever touched it. I still have my seven coloured notebooks, covered with their Tarot signs. My taste for travel and my ear for footsteps had diminished, it seemed. I was thirty, and it was time to consider the way I should go myself.
I was sitting late one afternoon, after the Bibliothèque had closed, on a bench in the Palais-Royal watching the workmen clear out the plane-tree leaves from the stone bowl of the fountain. The water had been switched off. Couples strolled arm in arm in the galleries, stopping to look in the lit windows of the shops selling antiques and pipes and medallions. A stray dog, searching anxiously for its master, pattered lightly over the gravel and disappeared into the shadowed archway leading to the rue de Valois. Footsteps approached and a hand touched me on the shoulder. It was Françoise, come to meet me after work. We kissed lightly, as one does in France. “Tu devais rentrerchez-toi” she said.
Author’s Note
That dog pattering into the rue de Valois was of course the spirit of this mongrel book departing on a new adventure. It is difficult to give its genealogy, being part pure-bred biography, part travel, part autobiography, together with a bad dash of Baskerviile Hound. It will be evident that people and places, and my own diaries and reflections, have shaped the creature as much as any literary texts. But the most important printed sources for the lives of my four protagonists can be found in the following works, which provide at least an elementary bibliography—and I hope an encouragement to further reading:
ONE. Robert Louis Stevenson, Journal de route en Cévennes, avec Notes de Jacques Poujol (Editions Privat Club Cévenol, Toulouse, 1978); The Cévennes Journal, edited by Gordon Golding (Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1978); Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879); The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Sidney Colvin (2 vols., Methuen, 1901); Margaret Mackay, The Violent Friend (Dent, 1968).
TWO. Mary Wollstonecraft: Posthumous Works, edited by William Godwin (4 vols., Johnson, 1798); Collected Letters, edited by Ralph M. Wardle (Cornell University Press, 1979); William Godwin, Memoir of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Johnson, 1798); Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Weidenfeld, 1974); John Alger, A History of the English in the French Revolution (London, 1912); State Trials (London, 1794).
THREE. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford University Press, 1968); The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by F. L. Jones (2 vols, Oxford University Press, 1964); Mary Shelley’s Journal, edited by F. L. Jones (University of Oklahoma Press, 1947); The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Betty T. Bennett (vol I, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, edited by Donald H. Reiman (vols 5-6, Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, New York, 1973); The Journals of Claire Clairmont, edited by M. K. Stocking (Harvard University Press, 1968).
FOUR.Nadar par Jean Prinet et Antoinette Dilasser (Armand Colin, Paris, 1966); Testi di Nadar con Lamberto Vitali e Jean Prinet (Giulio Einaudi editore, Tor
ino, 1973); Gérard de Nerval, Oeuvres, présenté par Albert Béguin et Jean Richer (2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, 1960—vol I contains the poetry and correspondence, vol II most of the travel-writing); Théophile Gautier, Portraits et Souvenirs Littéraires (1875) and Histoire du Romanticisme (1874). Alfred Douglas, The Tarot (Gollancz, 1973) supplied much of my cartomancy.
For the use of copyright materials, and kind permission to consult and refer to manuscripts and archives my most grateful acknowledgments are due to the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Museum, London; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Keats-Shelley Museum, Rome; The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Inc., New York; the Bibliothèque Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Chantilly; Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh; Dent, London; Oxford University Press; Gollancz, London; Cornell University Press; University of Oklahoma Press; Johns Hopkins University Press; Harvard University Press; and the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris.
Other sources which have proved invaluable during my travels, or subsequently helped me clarify my conception of the book, include the fine maps and guides of Michelin; the incomparable Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris by Jacques Hillairet (Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1973); the newspaper files of Le Monde and The Times; The Quest for Corvo, An Experiment in Biography by A. J. A. Symons (1934); The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly (1944); After Babel by George Steiner (Oxford, 1975); A Second Identity by Richard Cobb (Oxford, 1969); and the Symphonie Fantastique, with its thematic Programme Note, by Hector Berlioz. The illustrative maps were drawn by Martin Lubikowski of MJL Cartographies. All translations from the French are mine.
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