Neglected Author - Gérard de Nerval

“Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.” - Gérard de Nerval
 
Gérard de Nerval was the nom de plume of the French poet, essayist and translator, Gérard Labrunie, born in 1808. He influenced not only the Surrealists but also many British writers such as Wilde, Dowson, Yeats and Symons.
 
His father was a military doctor in Napoleon’s army. When de Nerval was two his mother, accompanying her husband on service in Silesia, died of a fever contracted after crossing a bridge piled with corpses. De Nerval was consequently brought up by his maternal great-uncle in the Valois area of France.
 
He studied intermittently as a medical student but made an early name for himself in 1828 with his translation of Faust, a translation that was much admired by Goethe himself. He had become friends with the writer and dandy Théophile Gautier (famous for shocking the establishment by wearing a red waistcoat). In the 1840s he joined Gautier in a society known as the Club des Hashischines, a group devoted to the exploration of drug-induced experiences. Another club member, Charles Baudelaire, actually wrote Les Fleurs du Mal in the Club’s attic.
 
For a while de Nerval kept a pet lobster which he took for walks in Paris on the end of a blue ribbon. He regarded them as "peaceful, serious creatures, who know the secrets of the sea, and don't bark".
 
In true decadent poet style de Nerval fell in love with first a music-hall singer, Jenny Colon, and then a courtesan, Sophie Dawes, who was rumoured to have murdered her lover. Needless to say, nothing came of these infatuations apart from several nervous breakdowns. De Nerval did, however, build his inamoratas up into the status of the “Eternal Female”.
 
De Nerval’s masterpiece is probably his Journey to the Orient (published in 1851), a strange hybrid of a book, part travelogue, part recounting of Arabian Nights type tales. It came out of an extended trip he made in 1842 to the Levant, travelling to Cairo, Beirut and Constantinople in search of hashish, new and wondrous experiences, the occult, and (naturally) further pursuit of the Eternal Female”.
 
He rented a house in Cairo but was soon told he was offending Muslim etiquette by living without a woman. He was given two choices: convert to Islam and marry; or buy a slave girl. He chose the latter, visiting various slave bazaars before plumping unusually (most slave girls were Abyssinians) for a Javanese called Zetnaybia. He lived the life of a Muslim dandy with her for a few months and then, before moving on, gave Zetnaybia her freedom.
 
De Nerval returned to Paris after his travels but suffered increasingly from bouts of depression. He died on 26 January 1855, hanging himself from a window grating on a snowy street in Paris with an old apron string that he believed to be the Queen of Sheba’s garter.
 
Journey to the Orient is published by Peter Owen, and Penguin publish his Selected Writings.
 
(A version of this article first appeared in The Chap magazine.)