GERARD

See also:

• GERARD NERVAL

NERVAL  'DE (18o8–1855), the adopted name of Gerard Labrunie, French man of letters, born in Paris on the 22nd of May 18o8 . His father was an army doctor, and the child was left with an uncle in the country, while Mme Labrunie accompanied her husband in his campaigns . She died in Silesia . In 1811 his father returned, and beside Greek and Latin taughtthe boy modern languages and the elements of Arabic and Persian . Gerard found his favourite reading in old books on mysticism and the occult sciences . He distinguished himself by his successes at the College Charlemagne, however, and his first work, La France guerriere, elegies nationales, was published while he was still a student . In 1828 he published a translation of Goethe's Faust, the choruses of which were afterwards used by Berlioz for his legend-symphony, The Damnation of Faust . A number of poetical pieces and three comedies combined to acquire for him, at the age of twenty-one, a considerable literary reputation, and led to his being associated with Theophile Gautier in the preparation of the dramatic feuilleton for the Presse . He conceived a violent passion for the actress Jennie Colon, in whom he thought he recognized a certain Adrienne, who had fired his childish imagination . Her marriage and her death in 1842 were blows from which his nervous temperament never really recovered . He travelled in Germany with Alexandre Dumas, and alone in various parts of Europe, leading a very irregular and eccentric life . In 1843 he visited Constantinople and Syria, where, among other adventures, he nearly married the daughter of a Druse sheikh .

He contributed accounts of his travels to the Revue

des Deux Mondes and other periodicals . After his return to Paris in 1844 he resumed for a short time his feuilleton for the Presse, but his eccentricities increased and be committed suicide by hanging, on the 25th of January 1855 . The literary style of Gerard is simple and unaffected, and he has a peculiar faculty of giving to his imaginative creations an air of naturalness and reality . In a series of novelettes, afterwards published under the name of Les Illumines, ou les precurseurs du socialisme (1852), containing studies on Retif de la Bretonne, Cagliostro and others, he gave a sort of analysis of the feelings which followed his third attack of insanity . Among his other works the principal are Les Filles du feu (1854), which contains his masterpiece, the semi-autobiographical romance of Syl ., Scenes de la vie orientale (1848–185o) ; Contes et faceties (1852); La Boheeeme galante (1856); and L'Alchimiste, a drama in five acts, the joint composition of Gerard and Alexandre Dumas . His Poesies completes were published in 1877 . There are many accounts of Gerard de Nerval's unhappy life . Among them may be mentioned notices by his friend Theophile Gautier and by Arsene Houssaye, prefixed to the posthumous Le Reve et la vie (1855); Maurice Tourneux's sketch in his Age du romantisme (1887); and a sympathetic study of temperament in the Nevroses (1898) of Mme Arvede Barine . See also G . Ferricres, Gerard de Nerval (1906) .