The title refers to a semi-Masonic order of free-thinkers and esotericists founded in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century and who, according to Nerval, were among the crucial harbingers of the French Revolution, constituting a sort of secret society whose Valois headquarters was the castle of Ermenonville, a site associated with the final days of that other Utopian visionary and Nervalian alter ego, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Provocatively subtitled ‘Precursors of Socialism’, Nerval’s portrait gallery limns the lives and works of a series of forgotten or marginalized figures ranging from the semi-fictional Raoul Spifame, a mad sixteenth-century social reformer and printer, to such eighteenth-century authors and adventurers as the prophetic seer Jacques Cazotte, the ‘communist’ polygraph Restif de la Bretonne, the alchemist and necromancer Alessandro Cagliostro and the neo-pagan philosopher Quintus Aucler – all to varying degrees secret sharers of Nerval’s own Promethean dreams of a mankind redeemed by the purifying fires of the communitarian Imagination.

Given its pervasive allusions to the subterranean Enlightenment counter-traditions of Swedenborgianism, Rosicrucianism, Mesmerism, Martinism and Freemasonry, The Illuminati has often been taken as evidence of Nerval’s deep initiation into the doctrines of esotericism and the occult; indeed, an entire tradition of scholarship stemming out of surrealism has sought to interpret his work in terms of the symbolism of arithmosophy, astrology, alchemy or the tarot. But while he undoubtedly shared his positivist century’s fascination with the bric-à-brac of the supernatural, Nerval’s idiosyncratic system of belief in spiritism, Neoplatonism and the ancient mystery religions is continuously offset (and here he most resembles a Shelley or a Heine) by an intellectual agnosticism inherited from the Enlightenment, leavened by the lucid awareness that the death of God has, as he puts it, left but ‘a number of dark doors opening on to the void’. It is this particular state of in-betweenness (or what he calls, like Hölderlin, the plight of the ‘interregnum’) that Nerval most frequently underscores when addressing the spiritual crisis of his generation of belated romantics, ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead/ The other powerless to be born’. Hence the self-portrait he provides of himself in The Illuminati as Apuleius, second-century syncretist and author of The Golden Ass, ancestor of the modern dialogical novel:

initiate in the cult of Isis, pagan illuminé, half sceptical, half credulous, searching beneath the debris of crumbling mythologies for traces of prior or surviving superstitions, explaining fable with myth, and miracles with a vague definition of the occult forces of nature, then in the next breath mocking himself for his credulity or tossing out twists of irony here and there which disconcert the reader who might be taking him too seriously.

The pressures involved in sustaining this level of lived contradiction – Faust’s mysticism and Mephisto’s irony vying for the same voice – may have proved too much, for while preparing The Illuminati for publication and reeling from the resounding box-office failure of his most recent play, Nerval fell into a feverish state of ‘erysipelas’ which required a three-week hospitalization in early 1852. Upon his release, staving off creditors, having mortgaged his future by signing contracts left and right for books yet (or never) to be written, he threw himself into a fervid pace of production. Between May and December, amid the ever more repressive climate of literary censorship following Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, he published what now amounts to 500 pages in the Pléiade edition of his collected works: The Illuminati, Lorely (his collected travels in Germany and the Low Countries), ‘October Nights’ (his satire of Dickensian ‘realism’), Castles in Bohemia (his memoirs of his Doyenné days), and Fibs and Squibs (his lighter fiction). Exhausted by his labours, he was again hospitalized for ‘fevers’ in early 1853, this time for a month and a half. Left free to roam his childhood Valois over the spring and summer and momentarily rid of what he called his ‘black butterflies’, he wrote ‘Sylvie’, generally regarded as one of the most limpid masterworks of French literature. One week after its publication in August, overheated, he suffered a complete mental collapse.

Nerval would spend most of the remaining year and a half of his life in the care of Emile Blanche, the son of his previous alienist. Like his father, Blanche was a cultivated man who took a particular interest in artists and writers (Maupassant would later become a patient) and his Passy clinic, a stylish hôtel particulier just a stone’s throw away from Balzac’s house, was known for the weekly gatherings of philosophers and savants organized by his wife. Nerval’s reaction to his new family environment was, to say the least, ambivalent. Although his intramural correspondence with his doctor is filled with expressions of grateful deference and warm filial affection, he clearly chafed at his incarceration by a figure twelve years his junior whom he remembered from 1841 as a mere youth. Above all, he continued to rail against the medical classification of his condition as a case of ‘madness’; as far as he was concerned, he was merely suffering from temporary ‘nervous exaltation’ or ‘agitation’ and in desperate need of rest. In a letter written to his father shortly after the latter had had him officially committed to Blanche’s asylum – a letter sarcastically addressed to ‘Monsieur le Docteur Labrunie, ancien médecin en chef militaire’ – he not only claimed to be in perfect health but moreover expressed his astonishment that he was being treated as a patient, no one yet having recognized that he too was ‘something of a doctor’. The letter mischievously concluded ‘Let’s hope that Asclepius will save us from Hippocrates’, pitting the Greek god of healing (who cured the sick by appearing in their visions or dreams) against the founder of modern medicine – yet one more allegorical instance of the great battle between Reason and Imagination, Poetry and Science.

Humiliating though his internment might have been, for the first time in years Nerval had a room of his own in which to gather his few worldly possessions; furthermore, Blanche periodically allowed him to venture out into Paris, so he was not entirely isolated from friends. Temporarily relieved of financial worries (highly placed acquaintances had again arranged to defray the cost of his hospitalization), he was able to give himself entirely over to his ‘waking dream’. In the course of November 1853, rediscovering his poetic voice after a lapse of twelve years and composing in what he described as ‘a state of supernaturalist reverie’, he wrote the great sonnets ‘Artémis’ and ‘El Desdichado’. The latter was published the following month in Dumas’s magazine Le Mousquetaire as part of a humour piece in which the editor, adducing the text as evidence of the poet’s delusions of grandeur, poked fun at his dear friend’s recent barminess, just as Janin had done in 1841. During this same autumn, drifting in and out of visions, Nerval also wrote ‘Pandora’, a Hoffmannesque study of the disintegration of personality later published (and mangled) by Dumas. Meanwhile, he was preparing his Daughters of Fire for publication; when the volume appeared the following January, it contained his finest writing to date: ‘Sylvie’, ‘Angélique’ and five other tales devoted to the dark effulgence of the Eternal Feminine, followed by the sonnets of ‘The Chimeras’. Deeply wounded by Dumas’s recent derision of his work, Nerval added a lengthy preface in which he attempted to clarify his creative method to his colleague – a method, he argued, that had nothing to do with madness but rather with a tradition of poetic anamnesis that reached back to Plato and was grounded in the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls. To invent, he explained (in a passage not lost on Proust), was always to re-remember, to experience the present as the suddenly rediscovered trace of all one’s previous incarnations. The ‘I’ who spoke in his works – as Keats famously said of the ‘chameleon poet’ – therefore had no strict identity of its own, for it was nothing more than a fleeting link in the great intertextual chain of metempsychosis.

During this same extraordinary burst of creativity, Nerval also began work on what would eventually become ‘Aurélia’, his semi-fictional account of his initiatory descents into the netherworld of vision. To judge from his correspondence with his father and doctor in the course of December 1853, the project seems to have originated as a kind of therapeutic experiment in which the patient was asked to transcribe his dreams and to narrate the various ‘impressions’ left by his illness. Despite his professed contempt for medical science, Nerval apparently went along with the endeavour at the outset, if only to prove to his doctor that he had now recovered his reason and deserved to be released. The project, however, was abandoned after a few initial drafts, perhaps because Blanche had come to realize that the reflexivity demanded by this kind of clinical self-analysis was merely compounding the psychic fissures it was meant to heal. Nerval’s letters corroborate the extent to which he felt trapped by his narcissistic obsession with his own plight: ‘I am feeding off my own substance and not renewing myself,’ he wrote, adding that he needed to move beyond ‘this tendency to record only my personal impressions’ and to avoid ‘turning in too narrow a circle’.

Somehow he managed to convince his doctor that only a major journey abroad could dispel the inward spiral of his solipsism, for in late May, having acquired a passport valid for travel as far as Constantinople and a small subsidy from the Ministry of Education, Nerval was again off to Germany, ostensibly to undertake research on treaties governing international translation rights. In his letters to his friends and colleagues back in Paris, he boasted of fresh projects and promised articles in the next mail, but all of this was a mere smokescreen to conceal the fact that, not having published a single line in over six months, he was panicked by his growing realization that he could no longer function as a professional man of letters. Drinking heavily, swinging between moods of manic elation and profound dejection, he drifted through Germany for two months with no clear destination or purpose in mind.