Les Filles du feuLes Chimères by Gérard de Nerval

Les Filles du feuLes Chimères Reviews

• 
  Warwick

  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 no fewer than 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 all my 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 Sylvie's slim waist; she 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 fasten a dress?’ 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.
  
  (April 2013)
• 
  James F

  Gerard de Nerval (real name Gerard Labrunie, 1808-1855) was one of the early French Romantic authors; he became mentally ill and was in and out of institutions; the stories in this book were written in between stays, shortly before he committed suicide (or was killed by robbers, according to some of his friends.)
  
  This book consists of a preface in the form of a rather bizarre letter to Alexandre Dumas, five short stories, two essays, and a one act play, completed by a short appendix of poems called Les Chimeres.
  
  I began reading Umberto Eco's Six walks in the fictional woods, and in the first chapter he said he would be discussing throughout the book Nerval's Sylvie, which he called "perhaps the best book ever written." So I downloaded a pdf of that and read it; when I tried to find it on Shelfari to enter my review I discovered it was part of this collection, which I had in a box of books I bought at a used bookstore last Christmas, and read the rest of the book.
  
  The first and longest story is "Angelique"; it is the story of a scholar looking for a book in various libraries and bookstores, and either not finding it or finding that it is a different book (shades of Italo Calvino!). The story seems almost postmodernist, reminiscent of Calvino and Eco himself, and I was surprised it wasn't this story which he was enthusiastic about.
  
  The second and second longest is "Sylvie, Souvenirs du Valois". This story begins with a young man, on the verge of middle age, who has a crisis of revulsion from his life in Paris and returns to a small town in Valois to try to rekindle a relationship with the girlfriend of his adolescence. The story continues in flashbacks or reminiscences which show what he had and let slip away. The story is good, well-written and entertaining, with much -- perhaps too much, for my taste -- Romantic description of landscapes, and frequent allusions to Rousseau. However, it was certainly not one of best things I've ever read, and I'm interested in going back to the Eco book to find out what he saw in it that I missed.
  
  The remaining stories were good, but not anything really out of the ordinary; together they made a sampler of nearly all the common themes of Romantic literature. A book I liked and am glad to have read, but not one I will be going around urging others to read.
• 
  Pierre E. Loignon

  Précédé d’une dédicace à Alexandre Dumas, où Nerval évoque les épitaphes de sa mort et de son esprit, car vint un temps où on l’a cru mort et un autre où on l’a cru fou, ce recueil de textes en prose, suivi de quelques poèmes, a quelque chose de fascinant, de surprenant, de magique.
  De l’ensemble, on ne retirera évidemment pas grand-chose de précis pour la vie pratique, mais plutôt diverses impressions pleines de douces rêveries poétiques.
  Son auteur a quelque chose d’unique et de vraiment mystérieux puisqu’il n’apparaît nulle part d’une manière définie. Il disparaît en effet toujours derrière divers styles empruntés qu’il s’approprie si parfaitement qu’on dirait qu’il y joue à chaque fois tout son être sans qu’une véritable personnalité s’en dégage. On peut évidemment noter son intérêt pour l’érudition, qui le mène à discuter d’histoire ou à immortaliser quelques artéfacts d’un monde paysan aujourd’hui effacé, sa propension quasi-animiste à tout spiritualiser et sa manière très délicate et tendre d’aimer les femmes, mais, en dehors de tout cela, il est entièrement dénué de consistance propre.
  La « folie », d’un être vide de soi ... voilà qui fait pour moi tout le charme de l’apparition véritablement fantomale que constitue ce joli receuil.
  
• 
  Rahma.Mrk

  Nerval est un romancier français,lors des derniers jour de vie,en souffrant d'une maladie mentale,a écrit ce livre.
  Ce qui signifie le choix du titre en premier lieu et Certaines idées incompréhensibles
  
  Cet ouvrage se divise en deux parties:
  
  * Les Chimères : elle traduit clairement,sa définition : idées sans rapport avec la réalité,rêve et illusion, sincèrement j'ai rien compris plusieurs verres mais j'aime le style romantisme d'écriture.
  
  * Les filles du feu: par contre j'ai bien aimée la deuxième partie, où il désigne des femmes par des prénoms très romantique, en rapport parfois par sa vie sentimentale réel ( c'est à dire les femmes qui les aimées et rencontrés ) ou bien des femmes imaginaire et mythique.
  
  Pour Nerval la femme est une flamme avec les points positives et négatives de ce définitions.
  Elle est la bonté et la méchanceté en même personne.
  
  Je suis fascinée de style romantisme et l'originalité de ce poète.
• 
  Emilia

  Telles sont les chimères qui charment et égarent au matin de la vie. J’ai essayé des les fixer sans beaucoup d’ordre, mais bien des cœurs me comprendront. Les illusions tombent l’une âpres l’autre, comme les écorces d’un fruit, et le fruit c’est l’expérience. Sa sauveur est amère, elle a pourtant quelque chose d’âcre qui fortifie—qu’on me pardonne ce style vieilli.
• 
  Melusina

  A truly wonderful book with little strange novellas and 12 of the greatest poems ever written in French literature, according to Proust.
• 
  Mathieu

  Several wonderful short stories, 'Sylvie' stands out as Nerval's masterpiece.
• 
  Mathias 🍂

  Nerval writes one of the most powerful poetic works I’ve ever read, his thoughts are transmitted take form in both sonnets and poetic novellas.
  I don’t know why I connect with his work so much, but there’s something profoundly striking about what he says and how he says it.
  
• 
  Metin Yılmaz

  Nerval’in duygulu dünyasına bir giriş gibiydi. Ama sanıyorum beni beğendiğim bir tarz değildi. Biraz zor okudum diyebilirim. Oldukça kısa olmasına rağmen.
• 
  ebru

  Tentée par les poèmes oniriques de Les chimères, et particulièrement le sublime poème de El Desdichado (que j'ai fini par apprendre par coeur), j'ai voulu me mettre au recueil de nouvelles Les filles du feu. Le titre y jouait pour beaucoup (peut être car il me rappelait Portrait de la jeune fille en feu?).
  Malheureusement, j'avais de grandes attentes et j'ai été bien déçue. Certaines histoires étaient sans intérêt et j'ai fini par m'ennuyer, les seules histoires qui tiennent la route étant celles de Sylvie et la courte pièce de Corilla.
• 
  Ahmed Abdelsattar

  يبدو أن الكاتب كان واسع الاطلاع و المعرفة فقد ذكر الكثير من الشخصيات و الأماكن و المواقف التي لا أظن أنها من الممكن أن تجتمع في عقل واحد
• 
  Laura VANEL-COYTTE

  A lire et relire sans modération
• 
  Monica

  What's the best English translation of this?
• 
  Cyndie

  Les nouvelles sont très sympa à lire. Un peu déçue par une, mais le reste se lit bien.
• 
  Oğuzcan Önver

  başlayan hatırlamaz başta yoktu son bile, söylenmemiş aşkın güzelliğiyledir, bu adam olmasa dıranas şiir de yazamayacak, büyük aşklarından sylvie, jenny colon ve aurelia arasından sylvie'yı seçişim neden? 5 harften 4'ü tutuyor çünkü. benim kendi kendime gelin-güvey olduğum kimine göre lânet olası, kimine göre de şükredilesi bir vakıa. ben ise yancağızımda bir aşık isterdim.
  
  'şairleri durmadan öldürmeliyiz
  kesin değil çünkü
  kendilerini sokak fenerlerine asmaları'