Selected Writings Read Online

While in Leipzig, he may have secretly visited his mother’s grave in nearby Gross Glogau, for, as he hinted in a letter to Liszt, she was the phantom Lorelei who had lured him back across the Rhine – or the Styx – to his ‘second homeland’. Significantly enough, in this same letter he went on to ask his friend about arranging for a German translation of a ‘roman-vision à la Jean Paul’ he was working on – an allusion to the ‘Aurélia’ project, now reconceived as an Orphic quest romance centred around the female figure of Death and modelled on the experimental dream narratives of Jean Paul Richter. This ‘romantic millipede’, he informed Liszt, would be far clearer to German readers than to the French: as far as the standard fare of Parisian literature was concerned, he henceforth considered himself a foreign author.

Alarmed at the state in which his patient had returned from Germany, Blanche kept him under strict surveillance from August to late September, allowing him no contact with the outside world. But no sooner was this regimen relaxed than Nerval took his revenge: enlisting the help of his friends in the Société des Gens de Lettres, he orchestrated a campaign which led to a formal request on the part of this influential writers’ organization to have him officially discharged from the Passy asylum. His hands tied by this legal stratagem, Blanche had little choice but to set his ward free, despite his well-founded concerns for his health. On the eve of his release in mid-October, savouring the fruits of his victory, Nerval wrote a long, jeering letter to his doctor filled with Masonic gibberish and semi-delirious pleasantries – a calculated slap in his guardian’s face for which he would subsequently express great remorse. Several days later, in a letter to his fellow patient Antony Deschamps, he ironically compared his liberation to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden: ‘It is finished. I now have only myself and my impatience to blame for having been sent forth from paradise. It is henceforth in sorrow that I labour and bring forth.’ The letter was signed, ominously, ‘Gérard de Nerval, initiate and vestal’.

Although Blanche had insisted he be officially remanded to the care of a distant aunt in Paris (the aged Dr Labrunie having declined to assume any responsibility for his errant son), Nerval rarely stayed at her home. Proudly refusing offers of lodging or financial assistance from his friends and living under the constant fear of arrest or rehospitalization, he melted into the anonymity of urban poverty, camping out in cheap hotels and repairing to public reading rooms or all-night taverns in order to write. All his energies were now devoted to preparing ‘Aurélia’ for publication – an arduous process, given the disarray of his manuscripts and the increasing vagrancy of his existence. After several months of intensive revision, a first instalment appeared in the Revue de Paris on 1 January 1855 with the subtitle ‘Le Rêve et la Vie’ – ‘Dream and Life’. Nerval’s faculties, however, were rapidly failing him; he complained to friends his memory had become so unreliable that he was barely able to compose more than two consecutive lines a day: given this rate of progress, how could he ever hope to support himself by his pen again? In addition, the more he tried to bring ‘Aurélia’ to completion, the more he realized the extent to which he had written himself into a corner. Whereas his text told the triumphant Dantean tale of an ailing and wayward soul who through the maternal mediation of a Beatrice is eventually redeemed and restored to health, his own sorry condition seemed utterly to belie this radiant narrative of salvation.

Or did it? Nerval’s last words, contained in a brief note addressed to his aunt the day before he hanged himself in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, suggest motives that point beyond the pitch-dark of despair. ‘Don’t wait up for me tonight,’ he wrote, ‘for the night will be black and white.’

CHRONOLOGY