I shall attempt to return. Addio.’ The note was signed ‘Il cav[aliere] G. Nap. della torre brunya’ – an impersonation of a madman impersonating Napoleon? Later that summer, however, having recovered his health, his tone changed; still smarting from the humiliation of Janin’s tasteless article, he wrote him a sarcastic letter of rebuttal which he requested the newspaper to publish, if only to inform its subscribers that he was indeed alive and well and in full control of his faculties. The letter was never printed. Nerval felt that not only had he been made a public laughing stock, but that he had been buried alive.

A similar pattern may be discerned in his other letters of 1841, particularly in his correspondence with his contacts at the Ministry of the Interior (which, it would appear, provided the funds to cover his hospitalization). On the one hand, he was anxious to dissimulate the gravity of his illness, fearful that it might cost him further official missions. On the other, his darkly paranoid insinuations that his current imprisonment was part of some larger political conspiracy only served to reconfirm his derangement, particularly when accompanied by such zany signatures as ‘a fool who thinks himself wise and would be if x’, ‘1/3 Gérard’, ‘He who once was Gérard and still is’, or, even more bizarrely, ‘D. G. Labrunöe dy Nâwae’. To judge from the verbal clowning and multilingual puns of these letters – whose ‘madness’ plays itself out directly on the level of the signifier – Nerval was clearly enjoying his performance as a court fool: indeed, he frequently compared himself to that literary stock-figure of lunacy, Ariosto’s Orlando, whose reason had flown off to the moon. Later he would dismiss his entire stay in bedlam as nothing more than an ‘amusing dream’.

In any event, he absolutely refused to concede that his condition deserved the clinical label of madness. Writing to the actress Ida Ferrier shortly after his release from Blanche’s sanatorium, he provided an analysis of his predicament worthy of a Foucault: ‘I was only allowed to be released and to mingle among reasonable folk once I had formally admitted that I had been sick – which took quite a toll on my pride and even on my honesty. Confess! Confess! they shrieked at me, as they used to do to sorcerers and heretics, and to settle the matter, I allowed myself to be classified as afflicted with a malady defined by doctors and variously labelled Theomania or Demonomania in the medical dictionaries. Availing itself of the definitions included in these two articles, science has the right to conjure away or reduce to silence all the prophets and visionaries predicted by the Apocalypse, among whose company I flattered myself I belonged!’ At stake, in short, was nothing less than the perennial battle of the Imagination against all those discourses – medical, penal or theological – that sought to strip it of its rightful sovereignty.

If Nerval could allude with such confidence to his newly found prophetic powers, it was because, as he wrote to his friend Victor Loubens, not only had he undergone a ‘transfiguration’ or ‘illumination’ that had convinced him he was now a living god, but he had also been endowed with a supernatural vision of the ‘magnetic harmony’ or chain of correspondences linking this world to the next:

You see spirits who talk to you in broad daylight, at night you see perfectly shaped, perfectly distinct phantoms, you think you remember having lived in other forms, you imagine you are growing very tall and that your head is touching the stars, the horizon of Saturn or Jupiter spreads before your eyes, bizarre creatures appear before you with all the characteristics of real beings … If the mind has to become completely unhinged in order to place us in communication with another world, it is clear that the mad will never be able to prove to the sane how blind they are, to say the very least!

In this same extraordinary letter (which strikingly prefigures ‘Aurélia’), Nerval discloses that in the course of his ecstatic ‘fever’, he had ‘spoken in verse the whole day through’, and then goes on to quote four sonnets written ‘in the midst of my hallucinations’ – which, perhaps fearing they might be incomprehensible to his friend, he ascribes to the ‘semi-mythological and semi-Christian mishmash that was brewing in my head’. Something of the same diffidence seems to inform his communication of another clutch of poems to Gautier from the asylum. Meticulously copied out in a minute hand on a single sheet of paper, these six sonnets are accompanied by a note in which Nerval playfully compares himself to an eighteenth-century libertine imprisoned for pornography, almost as if to undercut the searing prophetic intensity of the texts he has enclosed. Whatever his motives, Nerval chose to keep his sonnets of 1841 under wraps for another thirteen years; of the poems produced during this period, only ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives’ and an early version of ‘Delphica’ (the least hermetic of the lot) were published in the forties. As for the rest, it would take another major mental breakdown in 1853 (which in turn produced ‘El Desdichado’ and ‘Artémis’) for him to recognize, at long last, his accomplishments as a poet. Yet even when he finally included his ‘Chimeras’ as an addendum to his volume of stories, The Daughters of Fire, he took the precaution of prefacing them with a characteristically ironic disclaimer, addressed to the deaf ear of his erstwhile mentor Dumas: ‘The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.’

In the case of his first madness of 1841, the cure was to take the form of a twelve-month journey abroad; like the epileptic Flaubert several years later, Nerval would seek his therapy in the Orient, ‘mother of us all’. Having somehow acquired a bulky daguerreotype machine (which soon malfunctioned) and the guarantee of free first-class passage on the French national steamship lines, he wrote to his father on the eve of his departure:

Last winter was wretched for me, my state of dejection sapped me of all energy, my awareness of how little I was producing weighed ever more heavily on me, and the feeling that I could only elicit pity in the wake of my terrible illness even made all social contacts painful. I had to extricate myself from all this by a major undertaking that would erase the memory of these things and provide me with a new physiognomy in the eyes of the world. Try to understand that the realization of this great undertaking is a stroke of good fortune that has befallen me and the guarantee of a position in the future.

Relatively little is known about the precise details of Nerval’s travels through Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey over the course of 1843. His letters to his father do little more than recount the obligatory visits to various sites and monuments while reassuring him on the score of his health. With Gautier, he in turn hides behind the macho swagger of the sexual tourist, informing him for example from Cairo that his travelling companion, a certain Fonfride,

has bought an Indian slave and since he wanted me to fuck her, I refused, so he didn’t fuck her either and that’s the way it has remained. This woman is costing us a fortune and we no longer know what to do with her. You can have as many other women as you like. You get married à la copte or à la grecque and it’s far less expensive than buying women, as my companion was boorish enough to do.

Gautier, who was keeping the Paris newspapers abreast of Nerval’s travels, acting as publicity agent for the latter’s new persona as an Orientalist, promptly spread the rumour that his friend had acquired his own private harem in Egypt. Playing along with this fiction, Nerval would later make his comic misadventures with the slave girl Zeynab the core of a series of articles with the titillating Balzacian title: ‘Scenes of Oriental Life: The Women of Cairo’.

Professionally, Nerval’s career investment in the profitable market of exoticist travel writing paid off handsomely. Published piecemeal in magazines over nearly ten years, his sprawling two-volume Journey to the Orient of 1851 was the first substantial book to appear under his name and the title that finally established him in the eyes of the public as a bona fide author.