Between 1852 and 1855, in a state of ever-mounting financial and mental disarray, Nerval published the bulk of the work on which his fame rests … He also began work on ‘Aurélia’, an autobiography of his madness which he envisaged as a modern version of Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’.
Having gained his release from Dr Blanche’s custody, Nerval spent his remaining days working on his spiritual testament, leading an increasingly vagrant existence in Paris. The first portion of ‘Aurélia’ was published in the prestigious Revue de Paris on 1 January 1855. Later that month, on the morning of 26 January, its author was found hanged.
Foreword to the Penguin edition of ‘Selected Writings’
Gustave Doré’s picture of Gérard de Nerval’s suicide in La Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne is surely one of the most extraordinary pictures of a suicide ever made. Doré draws de Nerval in a way which is almost brutal in its realism, showing the author’s commonplace countenance and unheroic figure dangling with its little pot belly over what looks like a foul urban drain. The harshness of the bottom part of the picture contrasts violently with the billowing clouds of fantastical figures above, while a skeletal Death blows a trumpet, a Poe-like raven looks on, and a dim white figure, seemingly the author’s ghost, gently rises above the corpse.
Doré was very accurate in his depiction of the sheer mundane ordinariness of Nerval’s face and physique, as can be confirmed by the few photographs of Nerval. It was Nerval’s brain alone which conjured up the magical aura which surrounds him, and which Doré suggests by the spectral cloud of beings above his hanged body.
Highly esteemed in France, Nerval is little known in Britain, perhaps because his writings, even in translation, are so intensely French.
Nerval himself sometimes referred to the difference between English and French authors, being oddly convinced of the supposed realism of Dickens. His wonderful piece ‘October Nights’ is, according to his translator Richard Sieburth, a satire of Dickensian ‘realism’. Nerval wrote:
How lucky the British are: they manage to write and read entire chapters of first-hand observation unencumbered by the slightest contrivance of fiction! In Paris, by contrast, they want their things sprinkled with anecdotes and love stories – preferably ending in death or marriage.
Our neighbours have a talent for realism that delights in absolute truth.
This same kind of realistic truth (not a trait one usually associates with Doré) can be seen in the artist’s depiction of Nerval’s suicide, its harshness ameliorated by ‘the contrivance of fiction’ in the attendant supernatural beings and wraiths.
JENNIE MACK GRAY, March 2026
GERARD DE NERVAL
Selected Writings
Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by RICHARD SIEBURTH
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