Between 1851 and 1855, fighting off creditors, desperately trying to gather his scattered writings into marketable form, he published six volumes of prose in quick succession, amounting to some two thousand pages. But by then it was too late. He would not even live to see his most extraordinary piece of writing, ‘Aurélia’, into final print. Its first instalment appeared in the Revue de Paris on 1 January 1855 with the indication: to be continued in the next issue’. What followed the next month, however, was merely a terse editorial note informing readers of its author’s demise. Legend has it that the conclusion of the text, posthumously published, was printed from the manuscripts found in the hanged man’s pockets …

Fragmented and tragically foreshortened as his career had been, few of his contemporaries (with the notable exception of Baudelaire) were able to seize the full import of Nerval’s achievement as they mourned his passing at the age of forty-six. Honoured for his professionalism as an homme de lettres, eulogized for his unfailing generosity as a friend, remembered for his endearing idiosyncrasies yet lamented for the unfortunate bouts of madness into which his imagination had fatally led him astray, he remained in the end ‘le doux Gérard’ – an epithet whose first-name familiarity, while no doubt affectionate, patronizingly consigned him to the literary purgatory of minor authors. In a sense, Nerval had himself encouraged this kind of condescension by affecting an outward modesty as extreme as his concealed pride. Even among his raucous fellow bohemians of the early 1830s he cut a decidedly unprepossessing figure, clad in unostentatious black while his peers engaged in more flamboyant sartorial provocations. By mid-career, he had perfected his art of self-effacement; dressed in a conservative frock coat, slightly balding and short-sighted, he seemed as anonymous, according to one contemporary, as a humble schoolteacher from the provinces. Nadar’s celebrated daguerreotype of Nerval, taken shortly before his death, brilliantly seizes its subject’s evasiveness: seated in an armchair, the stub of a cigar in his right hand, he warily looks at the lens with an air of beleaguered blankness, at once trapped and defiant in the face of the camera’s intrusive gaze.

Given his fierce discretion in private matters – even his closest friends were kept in the dark as to his shadowy comings and goings – Nerval’s critics have frequently had recourse to his published writings as sources of biographical information, in the process often mistaking his carefully wrought fictions for self-revelations. ‘I am among those writers whose life is intimately bound up with the works upon which their reputation rests,’ he observed with characteristic ambiguity. But if his life and works are indeed as inseparable as he claimed, it is only to the extent that both are constructed as literary performances, as roles played out by an imaginary character who is at once the author and the central protagonist of his myths. Catering to a readership increasingly eager to enter into the intimacy of its favourite writers – as Coleridge grumbled, literature had now entered into ‘the age of personality’ – Nerval discovered there was no deeper resource of fiction, no more powerful strategy of illusion than the autobiographical ‘I’. If he therefore adopted the first person singular in virtually all of his texts, it was paradoxically the better to guarantee his invisibility. Late in life, having come across a lithograph portrait of himself in a recently published biography, he inscribed the frontispiece with the enigmatic phrase ‘Je suis l’autre’ (‘I am the other’). It is perhaps a caveat addressed to any potential reader of his work: beware of mistaking me for myself.

Nerval’s rewriting of himself into another begins with the poetics of the proper name. He was born Gérard Labrunie, the son of Etienne Labrunie, a military doctor, and of Marie-Antoinette-Marguerite Laurent, who died in Germany when he was only two while accompanying her husband on the Grande Armée’s Russian campaign. From his adolescence well into his thirties, however, he chose to sign himself simply ‘Gérard’ – a nom de plume whose absence of surname at once suppressed all traces of parentage while at the same time suggesting a kind of romantic juvenility appropriate to his precocious talents. Symbolically, the name ‘Gérard’ articulates an unresolved conflict that will traverse his entire work, an ambivalence that finds its most acute Oedipal and theological expression in the doubt-ridden person of Jesus, who in his poem ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’ proclaims the death of God. How to silence the name of the father while continuing to speak as a son? How at once transgress and maintain the paternal law?

The solution Nerval devised is virtually a textbook case of Freud’s family romance. During his first serious mental breakdown of 1841, he worked out (in a delirious manuscript known as his ‘généalogie fantastique’) an elaborate family tree which essentially cancelled out his biological father and substituted a purely mythical line of paternal forebears, ranging from the Roman emperor Nerva and the Germanic king Otho to the imperial family of Napoleon – indeed, as he confessed to an acquaintance at the time, he was now fairly well convinced that he was the bastard issue of the Emperor’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, who had known his mother in Danzig during the wars. Be this as it may, he would emerge from his descent into the underworld of madness with a new aristocratic persona, ‘Gérard de Nerval’, a signature whose letters spelled out the anagrams of an identity that had triumphantly undergone a process of death (‘Averne’, or Avernus) and rebirth (‘vernal’) and was now destined for glory (the Greek geras). On a more secret level, it also functioned as a necronym that realized his fantasy of rejoining his lost mother, for not only did it echo the name of some land owned by her relatives in the Valois (the ‘clos de Nerval’, a deformation of ‘Noirval’ or ‘black vale’), but parsed backwards, provided a nearly perfect mirror image of her maiden name, Laurent.

This spectral figure who lies buried within the crypt of his name is almost never explicitly identified in Nerval’s works. But in ‘Rambles and Recollections’, one of the last texts he published during his lifetime, she resurfaces like a revenant amid memories of his early childhood in the Valois:

She died at the age of twenty-five from the exhaustions of war, carried off by a fever she caught while crossing a bridge littered with corpses where her carriage very nearly overturned. My father, compelled to rejoin the army in Moscow, later lost her letters and her jewels in the waters of the Beresina.

I never saw my mother, her portraits were all lost or stolen; all I know is that she resembled an engraving of the period, copied from Proud’hon or Fragonard, entitled ‘Modesty’. The fever from which she died has struck me three times at periods that have defined regular and periodic divisions in my life. At these moments, I have always felt my mind assailed by those images of mourning and desolation that surrounded my earliest infancy. The letters that my mother wrote from the shores of the Baltic or the banks of the Spree or Danube had been read to me so many times! My sense of the marvellous, my taste for distant voyages no doubt derived from these early impressions, as well as from my long residence in an isolated part of the country in the midst of the woods. Often placed in the care of servants and of peasants, I had fed my mind with bizarre beliefs, local legends and ancient songs.