Writers in Paris: Gérard de Nerval

"Melancholy hypochondria. It is a terrible disease: it makes you see things as they are."

~ Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval died on this day in 1855.

He was a French poet, essayist, and translator whose bohemian life and work captured the spirit of Romanticism while paving the way for Symbolism and Surrealism. Born Gérard Labrunie in Paris, he adopted the pen name "Nerval" and became known for his hauntingly beautiful and deeply personal writing.

“My education had been too free, and my life too vagabond, for me to easily accept a yoke that on many points offended my reason.”

Nerval had a gift for blending the mystical and the everyday, drawing on classical mythology, dreamscapes, and his own struggles with love and madness. He introduced French audiences to German Romanticism with his acclaimed translations of Goethe’s Faust and went on to craft his own enigmatic poetry, such as the sonnet collection Les Chimères.

With their dense symbolism and dreamlike quality, these poems seem like whispered secrets from another world—a deeper realm.

“I occupied myself with the meaning of my dreams, and this quest influenced my reflections on my waking state. I believed I understood that there existed a connection between the external and the internal world, and that carelessness or mental disorder alone falsified the apparent correspondences.”

Nerval's prose work, Aurélia, offers an intimate and heartbreaking look at his battles with mental illness. It blurs the line between reality and hallucination in a deeply human and profoundly visionary way. Nerval’s writing isn’t just something to read—it’s something to experience, as it draws you into the depths of his mind and soul.

A biographer once wrote: “Nerval… led a mysterious and scholarly life; he would read through the night with a candlestick tied to his head, and sleep at the foot of an enormous Renaissance four-poster bed, carved with salamanders and other symbolic devices, until the goddess of his dreams should descend to take her place between the sheets.”

He goes on to write that in Nerval, he saw “his whole life as a pilgrimage, or journey of initiation, intended to reunite the spiritual and material values of his generation.”

Though his life was filled with hardship, heartbreak, and recurring madness, Nerval’s work remains a testament to his genius. Tragically, he took his own life on this day 170 years ago. Still, his legacy endures, inspiring writers like Marcel Proust, André Breton, and countless others with his daring exploration of the subconscious and his poetic vision of the world.

Below is a passage about Nerval’s last days in Paris from David Burke’s — Writers In Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. I hope you enjoy it.

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In the decades after the Grand Châtelet was torn down, the surrounding tangle of shabby little streets and alleys remained. Among them was the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a cul-de-sac now buried beneath the Théâtre de la Ville. On the icy morning of January 26, 1855 (170 years ago today), Gérard de Nerval was found hanging from a lamp post in this alley.

The previous night he had left a note for the aunt with whom he had been living since his release from Dr. Blanche’s mental clinic in Passy three months earlier. It read: “Don’t wait for me this evening, because the night will be black and white.”

Despite Gérard de Nerval’s long history of mental illness, Theophile Gautier and other close friends refused to believe it was suicide.

A gentle man of forty-six, Nerval has been suffering from psychological disturbances for fifteen years, several times requiring stays at mental clinics, but through it all he continued to write the luminous prose and poetry which led Proust to rank him among the handful of greatest writers of the nineteenth century, and whose vision— “the seeping of dream into real life”— led Andre Breton to cite him a precursor of Surrealism.

At the time of Nerval’s death, the first part of his masterpiece “Aurelia,” a dazzlingly lucid account of the phantasmagorical life he led during his states of dementia, was running in La Revue de Paris, and the second part, pages of which were found in his pocket, was scheduled to appear three weeks later.

He is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

In the garden of the Tour Saint-Jacques, across Avenue Victoria from the Théâtre de la Ville, is a memorial to Nerval, a granite stele and a smooth boulder next it inscribed with his poem “The Disinherited One,” a quote from which T. S. Eliot used in The Waste Land:

I am the man of shadows--the widower--unconsoled, 
the prince of Aquitania, in the abandoned tower:
My only star is dead--and my starred lute
Carries as its emblem the Black Sun of Melancholy

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You can find this passage in David Burke’s — Writers In Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light