> Nerval lui-même qualifiait ce recueil de "descente aux enfers". Texte aux accents ésotériques souvent obscurs, Aurélia ressuscite le mythe d'Orphée en une succession de rêves prophétiques et de délires visuels dont les surréalistes devaient faire leur miel. Dans "son petit habit brun de toiles d'araignées", Nerval côtoie sans cesse la folie et, cas unique en littérature, s'y abandonne humblement, en toute lucidité. Même Rimbaud n'ira guère plus loin. Écrivant comme sous la dictée de forces surnaturelles, dans un style haletant, précipité (il se suicidera peu de temps après), le poète se dépouille sans regrets de tous les artifices du réel. Le rêve seul peut répondre à ses questions hallucinées. Images apocalyptiques, cris déchirants ("L'univers est dans la nuit"), Nerval, au fil d'errances sans soleil, cherche à la fois les fantômes de sa mère et de son amour disparus. Il crée pour finir un chef-d'oeuvre unique, une étoile solitaire, et trouve là l'immortalité tant désirée.
--Scarbo, Amazon.fr

> Les Filles du feu précédant Les Chimères, c'est la quête d'un or philosophal qui n'existe pas, mais dont Nerval a cru percevoir l'éclat dans l'alternance des jours et des nuits. Les Chimères à la suite des Filles du feu, c'est l'or poétique enfin trouvé, mais qui ne brille que sur fond de ténèbres.Gérard Macé

> Par Adrian (Laculturegenerale.com) : Les 150 classiques de la littérature française qu’il faut avoir lus !
07/05/2017 - Nerval est le romantique du rêve, de la folie, des hallucinations, du mystère. Le lire, c’est essayer de vivre avec lui une expérience qui s’aventure au-delà du réel !

A year after this book came out in 1854, its author hanged himself from a lamppost with an apron-string that he had nicknamed ‘The Queen of Sheba's garter’. Gérard de Nerval was not a well man – although if you're going to be a tragic French Romantic poet, this is an excellent way of asserting your credentials. If you only know one fact about him, it's probably that he had a pet lobster called Thibault whom he used to take for walks around the Palais Royal gardens on the end of a blue ribbon. Sadly it seems like this story may turn out to be apocryphal, but whatever, it sums him up pretty well.

Les Filles du feu is a collection of seven short stories and twelve sonnets. The stories are wild and weird and the sonnets are sublime. Their settings are split between the Valois in France and the Naples area of Italy, and each story is named after a woman – so that when I started reading this I wondered if it would be similar to Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques, which is also a collection of short stories about femmes fatales. But the mood here is utterly different. Gérard's heroines are ethereal, oneiric creatures whose personalities shift and fracture under direct attention. There is never only one of them: always some doubling of love interest, a blonde and a brunette, an innocent friend and a worldly seductress, a town girl and a country wench; but at the same time a very strong impression that they are all just the same single person, refracted into different characters.

…c'étaient les deux moitiés d'un seul amour. L'une était l'idéal sublime, l'autre la douce réalité. ("They were two halves of a single love. One was the sublime ideal, the other the sweet reality.")

It's often hard not to see this multiple-personality disorder as an aspect of Gérard's unstable state of mind. I mean it does genuinely feel like something pathological rather than a literary device. The most intense example is the story called ‘Octavie’. It's only nine pages long, but it involves FOUR different women, several time periods, and a handful of different countries, all of which seem to shift and fade into each other. I read it in a café just after I bought the book and I was so confused when I finished I thought I'd forgotten how to read French.

When it works, though, it's very very moving. The instability of time and character makes Gérard especially good on the subject of how memory works, especially memories of lost love. It's no surprise that Proust adored ‘Sylvie’, the best-controlled and most famous story in the collection, calling it ‘a model of sickly unease’. I actually preferred ‘Sylvie’ to anything I've read in Proust himself. The plot is typical: our narrator returns from Paris to his home village in the Valois, as part of an attempt to get over his infatuation with an actress (Aurélia). But going home brings him back in contact with his childhood sweetheart (Sylvie), as well as reawakening memories of a third woman (Adrienne) whom he glimpsed once at a childhood fair and has never forgotten.

It's not easy to explain why this feverish paean to unrequited love is so moving, except that there's something about the way time and place and person keep shifting here that perfectly matches the way your mind works when you're lying awake at three in the morning thinking about stuff like this. A lot of the pleasure also has to do with the very beautiful descriptive passages – I particularly loved the long scene where the narrator remembers visiting Sylvie's aunt's house with her and playing dress-up in her old clothes:

And Sylvie had already unfastened her calico dress and let it fall to her feet. The old aunt's dress fitted perfectly around the slim waist of Sylvie, who told me to do her up. ‘Oh! What funny flat sleeves,’ she said. And yet the sleeves, decorated with lace, showed off her bare arms admirably, her neckline framed by the high bodice with yellowing tulle and faded ribbons that had only barely tightened around the vanished charms of her aunt. ‘Get on with it! Don't know you how to do a dress up?’ Sylvie was saying.

I said that these stories were split between Naples and the Valois, but there's one notable exception – the one called ‘Jemmy’. Have a look at this and imagine what a jolt it is for a reader to suddenly reach this story after two hundred pages of dreamy French symbolism:

It so happened that a little while later, one fine December evening, Toffel saddled his dapple-gray stallion and, at a steady trot, climbed the winding paths that still today lead from Toffelsville to the high country, across the Ohio mountains.

What the—?! Could there be anything less Nervalian than this Old West anecdote about settlers in Ohio?! Gérard actually adapted this story from the Austrian-American writer Charles Sealsfield, but it turns out to fit his themes pretty well – again we have multiple doubling effects going on, a hero with two wives, a heroine with two husbands. Jemmy is also my favourite of all Gérard's titular females. She doesn't take any shit. When she's kidnapped by Indians, she escapes and travels for twenty days on her own to get back to civilisation, fighting off bears and living on papaw and wild chestnuts. It is the strangest feeling in the world to read this gruff piece of obscure Americana in a book by a French Romantic poet, and I am very grateful for the experience.

There is something very unsettling about this whole collection – a feeling that you are in the mind of someone who is losing their grip on reality. Doubtless it's just because we know what happened afterwards, but you can't escape the sense that the ground is very unstable under your feet in Gérard's stories, and that personality is gradually breaking apart – until at the end he comes loose from prose altogether, and floats off into poetry. The poems which close the book are untranslateable and incomprehensible. I loved them.

Je suis le ténébreux,—le veuf,—l'inconsolé,
Le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie :
Ma seule étoile est morte,—et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil Noir de la Mélancolie.

("I am shadowed, and widowed, and unconsoled – the Aquitainian Prince in his Ruined Tower. My lone star is dead, and my spangled lute bears the Black Sun of Melancholy.")

A note on translations: this collection isn't in print in English in its entirety and hasn't been translated for decades, but it looks like three of the stories are in the Penguin Selected Writings (sadly not including ‘Jemmy’) and I think some more are in Exact Change press's Aurélia and other writings. I recommend checking them out, and I recommend taking a good brisk walk in the sunshine afterwards. ( )