All this could certainly have made a poet of me, but I am a mere dreamer in prose.

While elaborating a kind of etiological origin myth in the manner of Rousseau, this text also provides one of the most telling examples of the eerie mechanism of haunting which, as Proust was the first to observe, propels so many of Nerval’s writings into the realm of the fantastic. Literally possessed from beyond the tomb by a phantom he remembers only as an idealized allegorical engraving or epistolary trace, Nerval retrospectively constructs his entire destiny – his career as a writer, his taste for travel, even the self-effacing modesty evident in his disclaimer of poetic talent – as the after-image of a ghost he never knew. Indeed, so extreme is his identification with this chimerical creature that his very body is envisaged as the ongoing vessel of her death, for, as he notes, the illness which carried her off has exercised its lethal contagion upon his own periodic maladies – an indirect allusion to his various hospitalizations for madness, a condition which, significantly enough, he always chose to characterize as the effect of his ‘fevers’.

In this particular autobiographical fable Nerval’s rural childhood idyll among his maternal relatives in the Valois is brutally cut short at the age of six by the intrusion of a uniformed figure who has returned from the wars and who promptly whisks him away from the enchanted forests of ‘La Morte’ to the city of Paris. Dr Labrunie, twice wounded in battle on his left leg and afflicted with a limp, was by most accounts a distant and taciturn authority figure. Trained as a gynaecologist, he had written his doctoral thesis on the dangers of abstinence and nymphomania among women: certain commentators have suggested that its graphic descriptions of ‘uterine frenzy’ and venereal disease may have encouraged what would appear to have been his son’s lifelong aversion to sex. In any event, Dr Labrunie decided early on that his only heir would follow in his footsteps and pursue a medical career. To this purpose, he was enrolled in the prestigious Collège Charlemagne in Paris in 1822.

Neglecting his studies, ‘Gérard’ instead chose to make a name for himself by publishing nine separate volumes of verse while still a lycéen. Most of this juvenilia dutifully observes the canons of neo-classicism in a rearguard patriotic reaction against the Anglophilia of early French romanticism. The only modern British poet who finds grace in the young bard’s eyes is Byron, hero of Missolonghi and model for the kind of poésie engagée he pursues in his volumes Napoleon and Warrior France and National Elegies, both of which lament the passing of Empire and exhort the French nation to rise up in revenge against the petty tyrants who have betrayed the memory of its former glories. Conventional as much of this early political poetry is, the legend of Napoleon rehearsed in these heroic metres already projects a private psychomachia on to world historical events: even as he memorializes the superhuman exploits of the Emperor, the adolescent poet must also vent his angry grief for a mother who had abandoned him to follow his father to the field of battle. Identifying now with the triumphant father, now with the orphaned son, alternately mythifying Napoleon in Blakean fashion into an Orc-like liberator or an Urizenic tyrant, the voice that speaks in these poems is condemned to enact, over and over again, the same ritual of inconclusive mourning.

A direct line can be drawn between the poetics of aftermath defined by these early elegies and the vatic sonnets of 1841, in which Nerval hermetically envisages the apocalyptic renewal of the French nation through the dynastic return of its fallen heroes and gods: even at its most cryptic, his poetry would never lose its initial political cast. Like many of his generation, he greeted the July Revolution of 1830 as a titanic awakening of the populist energies that had lain dormant since the Empire; swept up by youthful revolutionary fervour, he published a number of Hugolian odes celebrating this new victory of le peuple monarchs. His enthusiasm, however, proved short-lived; barely one year after the Trois Glorieuses, writing under the nihilistic pseudonym of ‘M. Personne’ (‘Mr Nobody’), he proclaimed his utter disillusionment with the new order in aggressively enjambed alexandrines: ‘For society is but a reeking swamp/ Whose depths no doubt are clear and pure/ But where what is most foul, most/ Rank and poisonous, floats forever to the top!’ Abandoning the public ambitions of his political verse, he retreated inward to listen to the music of a vanished France. His ‘Odelettes’ of the early 1830s restore to the French lyric a rhythm not heard since the Renaissance. Blending the Stimmung of the German lied with the mellifluousness of the Ronsardian lyric, these brief songs realize the poetic programme outlined in the important anthology of sixteenth-century verse Nerval had published in 1830 – to return contemporary French poetry to its national origins in popular chanson. Inspired by the writings of such German critics as Herder, he would later go on to become one of the pioneer folk musicologists of France, devoting a number of essays to the local legends and ballads of the Valois – siren songs of a lost mother.

This same ghostly presence, phantasmally associated with her grave beyond the Rhine, presides over Nerval’s early translations from the German, which included Faust, an anthology of modern poetry, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s and Jean Paul Richter’s fantastic tales. Although his command of the language was, by his own admission, no more than middling, his particular ear for German poetry, according to his friend Heinrich Heine, was unsurpassed among his contemporaries. The young Hector Berlioz, for one, was immediately drawn to the music he heard in Nerval’s Faust; his settings of eight of its lyrics in 1829, like his later Damnation of Faust of 1846, did much to canonize the translation as the standard French text of the play. Even the Sage of Weimar was recorded by Eckermann to have remarked upon its publication that although he could no longer bear to read his tragedy in German, this new French version had managed to restore the work to him in all its original youthfulness and vigour – a consecration which, as fate would have it, would take another two decades to reach its translator’s ears.

The success of his Faust drew Nerval increasingly into the milieu of theatre. Under the good auspices of Victor Hugo, he wrote a stage adaptation of the latter’s Gothic romance, Han of Iceland, which was never produced. Recruiting his former schoolmate Théophile Gautier into the fray, he subsequently played a leading role in the celebrated riots surrounding the première of Hernani in February 1830. More attempts to make his mark as a dramatic author followed: a Byronic Lara, a Hugolian Prince of Fools, historical dramas about the mad king Charles VI and the Renaissance alchemist Nicholas Flamel, various light comedies, ambitious operas – all stillborn. Fascinated, like most of his generation, with the illusionistic seductions of the stage and eager to profit from the lucrative opportunities offered by the thriving Parisian theatre scene, Nerval would spend the next twenty years pursuing fame and fortune as a playwright. Save for a few collaborations with Dumas, his dramatic career proved to be one long string of crushing disappointments.

The years just after the July Revolution have often been pictured as the golden age of French bohemia, largely on the basis of Gautier’s colourful memoirs of the period. While vaguely continuing to attend medical school to placate his father, Nerval threw in his lot with the young band of artists and writers who had gathered around Hugo – the so-called ‘Petit Cénacle’ or ‘Jeune-France’, a constellation of minor talents whose rebellion against their elders, though initially espousing forms of political radicalism (hence their affiliations with the left-wing students known as bousingots), for the most part limited itself to a purely symbolic display of disenchantment with the new philistine order. Affecting long hair, beards, Renaissance cloaks and doublets, and outré pseudonyms such as Petrus Borel the Lycanthrope, Jehan Duseigneur, Théophile O’Neddy and Auguste Mac-Keat, most of these young bohemians were more notable for their belated rehearsals of Byronic alienation than for their actual artistic achievements; indeed, most eventually ended up as hack writers or minor functionaries of the state.