1808–1855
Gérard de Nerval
Night-walker of old Paris, who loved the last vineyard on Montmartre and died in a lane by the Châtelet.
Gérard Labrunie, who took the name Nerval, was born in the rue Saint-Martin in 1808 and spent much of his childhood with relatives in the Valois, north of Paris, a landscape that runs through his finest prose. Back in the city he was a precocious member of the Romantic generation: his translation of Goethe’s Faust appeared when he was barely twenty, and he stood with Gautier and the young Romantics around Victor Hugo.
In the mid-1830s he shared rooms with friends in the impasse du Doyenné, a decaying corner of old houses between the Louvre and the Tuileries, long since swept away. Gautier, Arsène Houssaye and the painter Camille Rogier were part of that cheerful, penniless circle, which Nerval later recalled in La Bohême galante. It was there, in part, that the idea of literary bohemia was born.
Nerval walked Paris at night more than any writer of his time, from the markets of Les Halles to the taverns of the outer quarters, and wrote about it in Les Nuits d’octobre. His mental crises, from 1841 onwards, brought him several stays in the care of Dr Blanche. In his last years he wrote Sylvie, Aurélia and Promenades et souvenirs, which opens on Montmartre and its last vines. Early on 26 January 1855 he was found hanged in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a narrow lane near the present place du Châtelet.
On rencontre même une vigne, la dernière du cru célèbre de Montmartre, qui luttait, du temps des Romains, avec Argenteuil et Suresnes. Chaque année, cet humble coteau perd une rangée de ses ceps rabougris, qui tombent dans une carrière. Il y a dix ans, j’aurais pu l’acquérir au prix de trois mille francs… On en demande aujourd’hui trente mille. C’est le plus beau point de vue des environs de Paris.
✓ Quotation checked word for word against the edition cited.
Addresses
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168 rue Saint-Martin · 3rd · 1808
His birthplace, marked by a City of Paris plaque.
ICI / EST NÉ / LE POÈTE / GÉRARD DE NERVAL / 1808-1855
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Former impasse du Doyenné, now within the Louvre · 1st · c. 1834–1836
Site of the shared lodgings of the ‘bohème galante’ with Gautier, Houssaye and Rogier; the street disappeared when the Louvre was completed.
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Former rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, near the place du Châtelet · 4th · 1855
Site of the lane where Nerval was found hanged on 26 January 1855; the lane later vanished in the rebuilding of the Châtelet quarter.
