Gérard de Nerval
born
May 22, 1808, Paris, France
died January 26, 1855, Paris
French Romantic poet whose themes and
preoccupations were to greatly influence
the Symbolists and Surrealists.
Nerval’s father, a doctor, was sent to
serve with Napoleon’s Rhine army; his
mother died when he was two years old,
and he grew up in the care of relatives
in the countryside at Mortefontaine in
the Valois. The memory of his childhood
there was to haunt him as an idyllic
vision for the rest of his life. In 1820
he went to live with his father in Paris
and attend the Collège de Charlemagne,
where he met the poet Théophile Gautier,
with whom he formed a lasting
friendship. Nerval received a legacy
from his grandparents and was able to
travel in Italy, but the rest of his
inheritance he poured into an ill-fated
drama review. In 1828 Nerval produced a
notable French translation of Goethe’s
Faust that Goethe himself praised and
which the composer Hector Berlioz drew
freely upon for his opera La Damnation
de Faust.
In 1836
Nerval met Jenny Colon, an actress with
whom he fell passionately in love; two
years later, however, she married
another man, and in 1842 she died. This
shattering experience changed his life.
After her death Nerval traveled to the
Levant, the result being some of his
best work in Voyage en Orient (1843–51;
“Voyage to the East”), a travelogue that
also examines ancient and folk
mythology, symbols, and religion.
During
the period of his greatest creativity,
Nerval was afflicted with severe mental
disorders and was institutionalized at
least eight times. In one of his finest
works, the short story “Sylvie” , which
was written in 1853 and included in Des
Filles du feu (1854; “Girls of Fire”),
he re-creates the countryside of his
happy childhood in lucid, musical prose.
The memory of Jenny Colon dominates the
longer story Aurélia (1853–54), in which
Nerval describes his obsessions and
hallucinations during his periods of
mental derangement. Les Chimères (1854;
“The Chimeras”) is a sonnet sequence of
extraordinary complexity that best
conveys the musical quality of his
writing. Nerval’s years of destitution
and anguish ended in 1855 when he was
found hanging from a lamppost in the rue
de la Vieille Lanterne, Paris.
Nerval
viewed dreams as a means of
communication between the everyday world
and the world of supernatural events,
and his writings reflect the visions and
fantasies that constantly threatened his
grip on sanity. He attained the summit
of his art whenever he combined his
exquisite taste with his infallible
intuition for the appropriate image by
which to transcribe his dreams of a lost
paradise of beauty, fulfillment,
innocence, and youth.
