Footsteps by Richard Holmes
His agonised sense of being lost, of being in purgatory, surrounded by a world of symbols that he could never quite organise or interpret, is memorably expressed both in writing about the mystical madness of his adulthood in Paris and the magic geography of his childhood in the Valois. Wherever he travelled, he saw images of his own “disinherited” spiritual state. Whether it was in the romantic mythology of Germany with its Lorelei and mother-goddesses; or in the fertility cults of Egypt celebrating Isis and Osiris; or the Gnostic revelations of the Druses of Lebanon; or the memories of a classical golden age in Greece and southern Italy; or in the beautiful poetic superstitions and legends of the Valois—“where the heart of France has beat for a thousand years”—Nerval found evidence of a lost paradise no longer available to modern man.
He could see this in the smallest, most familiar things, like the little villages of the Ile de France isolated by the chemin de fer du Nord:
those poor abandoned villages which the railways have cut off from the circulation of daily life. They draw back into themselves, casting a disillusioned glance on the marvels of a new civilisation that condemns them or forgets them … they are like those circles in Dante’s Purgatorio, frozen in a single act of remembrance, where the actions of a past life are repeated and repeated in an ever-shrinking centre of consciousness.
Or he could describe this loss in the largest, most philosophic, reflections on the ruined temples and shrines all over the globe:
If there is, to be sure, something more terrifying than the history of the fall of great empires, it is the history of the death of religions. Volney himself was overcome by this feeling as he visited the innumerable ruins of once-sacred buildings. The true believer may still escape from this impression, but with the inherent scepticism of our age all of us must sometime tremble to find so many dark gates opening out on to nothingness.
But the coherence of Nerval as a historical figure, speaking so eloquently but quietly for the failing vision of Romanticism in France—this coherence begins to quiver and dissolve the moment one tries to approach him more closely and intimately. His two names, which might seem no more than a literary device, do genuinely represent a profound ambiguity in his “real” identity. Was he one of the last of the Romantic heroes; or a poor, suffering, psychotic misfit? Was he the picturesque personality—“le doux rêoeur”—described in the newspaper columns of his friends; or the anxious, guilt-laden, motherless son revealed in the long letters to his father and his physician?
This duality takes on a further, terrible twist in his last completed work, Aurélia—what Gautier called “the memoirs of Insanity dictated to Reason”—where the idea that he was a double personality, one condemned and one saved, becomes a central and inescapable obsession:
… What was this spirit that was both within me and outside me? Was it that Double of the legends, or that mysterious brother which the Orientals call the ferouer? Had I not been curiously struck by the Teutonic story of the knight who did battle all night in a dark forest with an unknown assailant—that turned out to be himself? A terrible idea seized me: mankind is cursed with a double nature, I told myself. One of the Fathers of the Church has written: “I feel two men within me” … In every man there is a spectator and an actor, the one who speaks and the one who answers. The Eastern mystics have seen in this idea two implacable enemies: the good and the evil genius. But am I the good one, or the evil one? I ask myself. In any case, the other is hostile to me. Who knows if there are not certain circumstances, or certain times in life, when these two spirits inevitably separate?
Here is Nerval in the full grip of his insanity, rushing headlong from German legends and Oriental mysticism to the Confessions of St Augustine and the dualistic philosophy of Romantic drama. His very madness lies in the conventionality of the doppelgänger idea, which seizes him like a wholly new and terrible revelation. This is the mythomania spoken of by his doctors; but it is also at the centre of his self-understanding. How could a biographer present this? Should one write the lives of two separate people, as Nerval himself sometimes experienced them?
The immediate answer was, of course not. The biographer must integrate the facets of his subject until he becomes the self-same man that others knew and loved and remembered. Yet it was clear to me that any biography of Nerval must account fully for his madness and suicide, both from without and within. To do this all paths led directly back into his childhood and adolescence. Even if one accepts the story of his love affair with Jenny Colon at face value, and in the way he presents it in Aurélia (and in the way Gautier embroiders it), it is evident that such an experience of unrequited love could never have affected Nerval so profoundly and disruptively, if it did not correspond to—or nourish itself on—damaging and wounding experiences of love lost or rejected from his earliest moments. I was thus, in a way, committed to psychoanalysing Nerval for myself; to achieving what even Dr Blanche had been unable to do. And as my months went by in Paris, I became more and more convinced that was exactly what could not be done, and that I had reached the limits of the biographical form, as a method of investigation. Instead, I found myself slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him. As if self-identification—the first crime in biography—had become my last and only resort.
If this sounds melodramatic, the problem can be shown simply in terms of sources. I have already explained how nearly everything we know about Jenny Colon depends upon Nerval’s retrospective view of himself, written in the last four years of his life, which is to say during his madness. So there are very few first-hand sources for what Nerval claimed was the most important emotional relationship in his life. The position is even more difficult for his childhood and teens. Virtually everything we know has to be extrapolated from Sylvie (1853), Promenades et Souvenirs (1854) and Aurélia (1855), where autobiography, romance and hallucination are inextricably mixed. For example, the travel-letters written from Germany between 1810 and 1812 by his mother, which letters Nerval says had such a shaping influence on him, have never been discovered. Did they ever exist? There are no letters or journals from Dr Labrunie or the Boucher-Laurent circle of relations. No one recorded any reminiscences of Nerval’s childhood at Mortefontaine, not even that faithful collector of antiquities, Uncle Antoine Boucher. Apart from a single five-line note (referring to the publication of Faust) there are not even any letters from Nerval himself before 1830, when he was twenty-two. (For comparison, there are over two hundred known letters from Shelley before his twenty-first birthday.) In fact Nerval did not begin to write regularly until he began to travel, and a continuous correspondence really only exists from the time of his first journey to Naples in 1834. This was one more reason why that early Italian visit began to seem so important to me, and the story Octavie promised me a final clue.
The consequence of this is that the biography of Nerval’s youth, even in the apparently circumstantial way that I have given it here (and omitting many key incidents, such as the dance with “Adrienne” in the grounds of the château of Mortefontaine, much beloved by Nerval’s French biographers), is almost entirely an artificial construct. That is to say, it uses unverifiable materials from the end of Nerval’s life to invent or imagine his beginnings. So I found myself effectively trapped within Nerval’s own mind and memory. To write a novel based on Nerval’s life from these materials would be perfectly satisfactory: it would have imaginative truth. But for me to write his biography meant entering into a solipsistic world, where the traditional structure of objective documentation, third-party evidence, and chronology dissolved.
So it was that I slipped into the literary labyrinth, and was slowly disorientated, and finally lost, until even my own Paris came to seem a kind of nightmare.
It is not a place to which I ever wish to return; but I can give briefly some idea of the forms in which I lost myself, and the “staircases and corridors” up and down whic
The writing of Amelia itself can be understood as Nerval’s deliberate attempt to reconcile these two disciplines, the one imaginative and the other diagnostic. As he wrote: “If I did not think that the mission of a writer is to analyse honestly what he experiences in the grave crises of life, and if I did not see this as a useful purpose, I would stop here, and would not try to describe what I experienced from this time on, in a series of visions that were perhaps totally irrational, or simply insane…”
Nerval also partially attributed his cure to the help he gave in Passy to another patient called Saturnin, who was in a cataleptic trance and being force-fed. By himself acting as a doctor towards Saturnin he exorcised his own fear of the Avenging Double and achieved visions of his own salvation. It was Saturnin, “the poor sick youth, but with a face transfigured and intelligent”, who brought him the final dream of his healing goddess. His star grows in the night sky, takes the form of Aurèlie, and walks between the two of them in a paradisal garden, where flowers sprout beneath her feet. She tells him: “The trial which you had to undergo has come to its term. Those numberless stairs where you exhausted yourself, clambering up and down, were the phases of your old illusions which confused your thought … It was necessary that your prayer should be brought to [the Holy Virgin] by a simple heart who was freed from all links with earthly things.”
Yet this view of Nerval, as primarily a medical case seeking his own cure, soon lost itself in the incapacity of medical science to do more than attach labels to his sufferings. It left the world of his imagination untouched, and this is what Nerval himself had said: “There are doctors and bureaucrats here who try to prevent one from extending the field of poetry into the public highway. They only let me out and allowed me to move freely among reasonable people when I had formally agreed with them that I had been sick. It was an admission that cost me a lot in terms of self-respect and even my sense of truth.”
I next moved to the opposite extreme, and began to interpret Nerval’s life almost entirely in terms of the magic world by which he himself was so fascinated. Much of this was influenced by the great Nervalian critic, Jean Richer, and his study Gérard de Nerval et les doctrines ésotériques (1949). But I went much further. Everything in Nerval’s life came to have symbolic meaning, full of archetypes, alchemical processes, astrological signs, mystic correspondences and invisible harmonies. I interpreted the seven sonnets of the Chimères as the seven alchemical processes—“El Desdichado” was Calcination, “Horus” was Putrefaction, “Myrtho” was Solution, “Delfica” was Distillation, “Antéros” was Conjunction, “Artemis” was Sublimation and “Vers Dorés” was Congelation; and these seven mystic processes became the seven phases of Nerval’s life, which corresponded to the “Seven Châteaux” through which he said every poet had to pass. The seventh château—“of brick and stone, dreamed of in our youth”—became the madhouse at Passy, which had once belonged to a Princess; and this corresponded with the châteaux at Mortefontaine or at Chantilly which had presided over Nerval’s childhood, where Sylvie his first love had danced, and where “Adrienne” (Sophie Dawes) had ridden in her costume of Amazon or Isis.
Every woman and goddess in Nerval’s story became a personification of his lost mother; every animal—the lobster in Paris, the parrot in the Valois, the scarab in Egypt—became messengers from the supernatural world. I even somehow incorporated the four voluptuous statues, representing the four rivers of France, which stand in the little garden outside the Bibliothèque Nationale, as the four stages of Nerval’s travels—to Germany, to Italy, to the East, and to the land of Dreams and Madness. I saw his whole life as a pilgrimage, or journey of initiation, intended to reunite the spiritual and material values of his generation. As he himself wrote: “My role seemed to be to re-establish the universal harmony by cabalistic art and to seek a solution by evoking the occult forces of diverse religions.”
Indeed, the further I went into this labyrinth of signs and rituals the more I came to believe that Aurélia was the complete and literal statement of his life. The key passage seemed the following:
From that moment, when I felt sure that I was being subjected to the trials of a Sacred Initiation, an invincible strength entered my soul. I imagined myself a Hero, living under the direct gaze of the gods. Everything in Nature took on a new aspect, and secret voices, warning and exhorting me, came from plants, trees, animals and the humblest insects. The talk of my companions took on mysterious turns of meaning which I alone could understand, and formless, inanimate objects lent themselves to the calculations of my mind. From combinations of pebbles, from shapes in corners, from chinks or openings, from the outlines of leaves, from colours, scents and sounds, I could see hitherto unknown harmonies springing forth. “How have I been able to live so long,” I asked myself, “outside Nature, and without identifying with her? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds … Though I am captive now, here on earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars, and they take part in my joys and sorrows!”
This wonderful but demented vision, a sort of deranged apotheosis of Romanticism, which Nerval experienced in the locked gardens of Passy, sometimes seemed to describe my own researches. I came to believe that my own biography would have magic properties, and I started to organise it in the form of a commentary on seven Tarot cards, each one covering a phase in Nerval’s life, presented not chronologically but in a series of cycles. It started with La Lune, Les Amoureux and L’Etoile… and ended with La Tour and, of course, Le Pendu—the Hanged Man card that appears also in Eliot’s The Waste Land. One late summer evening, at a cafe in the place Royal where we had our rendezvous, I showed my notebooks—seven notebooks in seven different colours—to my friend Françoise. Her face took on a curious expression. “Ce n’est pas la peine de te rendre fou, chéri,” she remarked quietly. “Ce n’est-pas ta vie à toi, après tout!” She swept me off to a late-night showing of Les Enfants du Paradis at La Pagode. And slowly I began to realise what was happening.
9
After many more weeks, full of strange occurrences which I prefer to forget, I abandoned my “magic” notebooks and returned to my point of departure: Nadar’s photograph of Nerval, taken just before his suicide. I felt I had got no nearer to him, and was in despair. There he still sat in the upholstered chair, with his deep eyes and the crooked, ironic smile beneath his moustache. (“J’embrasse ton vieux moustache” Gautier had once written to him in Vienna.) His lined face and thin balding hair seemed to show his sufferings, yet there was something kindly, almost boyish still in his features. His jacket was scruffy, his cravat badly tied, his shirt partly pulled out from the top of his trousers, like a schoolboy caught stealing apples. I noticed for the first time that he was holding the stub of a little cigar or papier-maïs, and that his index finger was dark with nicotine. It was funny: in all those dozens of memoirs and articles I had read by his friends nobody had remarked on the fact that Gérard smoked heavily.
Time was running out for me; for both of us. I had wandered the streets of Pontoise, Saint-Denis, Dammartin and Senlis. No longer lost villages, but flourishing townships linked into the gridworks of route nationale, their fate had been reversed: reintegrated into civilisation they had suffered a transformation never envisaged by Dante. They had become suburbs of paradise like everywhere else, shopping centres and arcades where Nerval’s footsteps were long lost. A few empty shrines alone remained—the sepulchre of St Denis, the gateway of Senlis Cathedral, the tomb of Rous
My mind turned back to Nerval’s suicide. Why had he finally done it? Why was there no suicide note? Suicides usually leave notes; but perhaps his whole work was a form of suicide note. Maybe this was the last link that I should try to trace back, the last footstep. The rue de la Vieille Lanterne was long gone—its place is now occupied by what is the orchestra pit of the Théâtre du Châtelet: for me another symbolic position. But suicide is frequently mentioned in Nerval’s work. Perhaps if I could find the original place in which it occurred, all would be solved. This would be my last journey, I thought; the last mystery I could hope to solve.