This wholesale sellout to the establishment by the extreme wing of French romanticism is perhaps most graphically illustrated by the subsequent trajectory of its most flamboyant representative, Théophile Gautier, who squandered his considerable talents in order to become the semi-official spokesman for the aesthetic ideology of the Second Empire. Of this entire generation of ‘Jeune-France’, only Nerval remained faithful to its transgressive energies to the very last.

In 1834, upon inheriting 30,000 francs (roughly equivalent to £40,000) from his maternal grandfather, a prosperous Paris linen-merchant, he set off for the south of France and Italy, where he made his first decisive encounter with the Neapolitan landscapes which suffuse the sacred geography of his later poetry and fiction. Upon his return to Paris, flush with his new financial independence, he took up residence with the painter Camille Rogier and the journalist Arsène Houssaye in the impasse du Doyenné, a street slated for demolition just off the place du Carrousel (the same quartier later elegized, possibly with Nerval in mind, by Baudelaire in ‘The Swan’). In his 1852 volume of reminiscences, Castles in Bohemia, Nerval nostalgically evokes this period as a succession of masked balls, all-night festivities and willing young ‘Cydalises’ – an extravagant fête galante for which, in defiance of his father’s strict principles of bourgeois thrift, he was all too willing to dilapidate his estate.

The role of dandy poet he was playing demanded a major passion, preferably for a star of the stage; after all, Hugo had his Juliette Drouet, Vigny his Marie Dorval and Dumas his Ida Ferrier. Nerval accordingly launched himself into a much-publicized infatuation for Jenny Colon, a plump, blonde, second-rate actress of easy virtue whom he proceeded to idealize into the unobtainable object of his unrequited love. To this improbable Beatrice he wrote a series of love letters whose entirely fictional tenor is borne out by their publication in 1842 (under the persona of a certain ‘Dubourjet’) as the short epistolary novel, A Novel in the Making. According to various contemporaries, it was to showcase Mlle Colon’s talents that Nerval founded the lavish theatre magazine Le Monde dramatique in 1835, though in all likelihood he merely saw this publishing venture (shades of Balzac) as an investment scheme that would provide employment for his friends while quickly earning him a fortune. Ill-starred from the very outset, the magazine went bankrupt after a few issues, swallowing up his entire inheritance in the process.

Caught in an ever-widening spiral of debt, Nerval sought to reverse his finances by hiring himself out to Alexandre Dumas, one of the most successful stage authors of his day but notoriously cavalier when it came to dealing with his stable of ghost-writers (or nègres, as they were known). Their first collaboration produced the 1837 comic operetta Piquillo, starring Jenny Colon, followed by a Caligula, both signed by Dumas – who pocketed the lion’s share of the receipts. The following year, Nerval accompanied him to Germany as a general factotum, vicariously enjoying his first taste of international literary celebrity: in his letters to his father from Frankfurt he boasted of invitations from the Rothschilds and soirées with the cosmopolitan cream of the diplomatic corps. The witty accounts of his experiences abroad with Dumas that he sent back to the Parisian newspapers were, typically enough, promptly plagiarized by the latter for his own successful book version of his travels. While in Germany, they drafted two more plays together: The Alchemist, which reflected Nerval’s fascination with Renaissance esotericism, appeared in 1839 under Dumas’s signature, while Léo Burckart, a taut Hamletic psychodrama involving a German student revolutionary who commits suicide after failing to assassinate his symbolic father, was at long last credited to ‘M. Gérard’. Held up by censorship problems for several months and indirectly sabotaged by Dumas, the play folded after a handful of performances.

Given his collaborator’s mendacity in money matters, Nerval found himself having to pursue a parallel career in journalism to meet his debts. In a Faustian pact straight out of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, he opportunistically offered his services to La Charte de 1830, the official newspaper of Guizot’s conservative party, and through the good offices of his friend Gautier made his entrée into the columns of Emile de Girardin’s influential semi-governmental daily La Presse, where he ground out copy as a drama critic and feuilletoniste. One of the more shadowy figures at the helm of La Presse was Joseph Lingay, whose access to the secret police files on all the major politicians of the day provided him with an enormous sphere of influence among the various ministries of the July Monarchy. Sympathetic to men of letters (he was on friendly terms with Stendhal and Mérimée), Lingay apparently arranged for Nerval to be awarded a secret mission to Vienna in 1839, ostensibly to investigate the climate of public political opinion in Germany and Austria and report back on France’s foreign image in the German-speaking press. The official justification for this mission confidentielle was that Nerval was being compensated for the censorship delays that had crippled the production of his Léo Burckart, though it is more likely that he was simply being rewarded by his highly placed friends in the Ministry of the Interior for his loyal journalistic services to the Guizot regime, a not uncommon practice during the period.

The sum Nerval received to defray his travel expenses amounted to no more than a symbolic pittance, but judging from his letters to his father, he undertook his journey in the delusion that he had been entrusted with a mission of vital political importance and was on the brink of a brilliant diplomatic career. Upon his arrival in Vienna, he was swept up into the glittering social life of the capital, rubbing shoulders with Metternich at French embassy functions and consorting with such artistic celebrities as Franz Liszt and his mistress Marie Pleyel, whom he fictionalized into yet another object of impossible love. Despite the surface glamour of his existence, Nerval was nearly destitute during most of his stay in Austria; after three months of living beyond his means, he was forced to travel a portion of the way back to Paris on foot – a humiliation which he hid from all but his closest friends. Outwardly he played the role of the charming French littérateur abroad, basking in the heady Habsburg atmosphere of erotic opportunity, magnetic seances and political intrigue, but privately he seemed to be increasingly losing his grip. His semiautobiographical tales from the Vienna woods – the Casanovian ‘Vienna Romances’ (published in 1841 under the persona of ‘Henri de Brégeas’) and the deliriously Hoffmannesque ‘Pandora’ (1854) – show a personality beginning to disintegrate under the claims of its contending identities. The few surviving diplomatic dispatches he sent back to the French ministries – in which, amid rambling disquisitions on the arcane intricacies of Central European Realpolitik, he advised his correspondents on the future conduct of French foreign policy and offered his further services as a secret informant in Germany – display a mind increasingly prey to delusions of grandeur.

Returning to Paris in the spring of 1840, Nerval again took up his forced labours at La Presse, cranking out reams of drama criticism in a few months while somehow also finding the time to translate Heine and, working at a white heat, to augment his version of Faust with ambitious selections from its visionary Part II. The following autumn he disappeared to Belgium on a mission funded by the Ministry of Education to investigate the pirate publishing of French books by la contrefaçon belge – an apt project for an author obsessed with counterfeit selves and Doppelgänngerei. In mid-December, he attended the Brussels première of Piquillo with Jenny Colon in the lead role and, as chance would have it, Marie Pleyel and the Queen of Belgium in the audience. This fateful conjunction of stars, coinciding exactly as it did with the return of Napoleon’s ashes to Paris, may well have pushed him over the edge. A month and a half later, after a series of violent episodes during mardi gras festivities in Paris, he was arrested and immediately hospitalized as insane.

All told, Nerval remained under lock and key for nine months in 1841, first in the care of a Mme Sainte-Colombe and then in the posher confines of the maison de santé of Dr Esprit Blanche, an alienist noted for his enlightened therapeutic practices – which, despite his occasional recourse to straitjackets or hydrotherapy to treat what he had diagnosed as Nerval’s ‘acute mania’, focused on bringing about the patient’s ‘moral’ cure in a supportive family environment. Although he privately complained about the ‘rather severe regimen’ imposed by his doctor, in public Nerval preferred to depict Blanche’s establishment, situated on the picturesque heights of Montmartre, as a mere rest home, a ‘kind of fashionable and aristocratic villa, filled with charming ladies and persons of the highest social standing’ and whose guests included such illustrious figures as the poet Antony Deschamps (who, mired in melancholia ever since his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, found a kindred spirit in the translator of Faust).

Much as he tried to disguise his condition, news of his plight quickly filtered out to the Parisian press. In the 1 March issue of the widely read Journal des Débats, the eminent drama critic Jules Janin entertained his readers with a lengthy mock-obituary which recounted the demise of the young author’s reason as a cautionary tale of the dangers of the poetic imagination, especially when addled by the reading of too much German literature. Nerval’s initial reaction to this satirical necrology was to play along with the role that had been thrust on him, for he immediately dashed off his cordial greetings to Janin from the beyond: ‘It is so beautiful out one can neither meet nor kiss indoors.