Sylvie: Memories of Valois

Nerval, Gérard de (1808-1855), translated by Kline, A. S. (contact-email)

Sylvie is a short prose narrative by Gérard de Nerval, first published in 1853 in La Revue des Deux Mondes and later included in the 1854 collection Les Filles du feu. The work was written during a period of mental instability in the author's life, involving repeated hospitalizations and disrupted cognitive states. It follows a male narrator, originally from the Valois region, who now lives in Paris and experiences obsessive, unfulfilled affection for an actress named Aurélie. Triggered by the memory of a rural festival in his hometown, he returns to the countryside and reflects on his past emotional connections with three women—Sylvie, Adrienne, and Aurélie—each representing a different mode of idealized or unattainable love.

The narrative proceeds as a sequence of recollections, merging memory, dream, and present experience. The narrator revisits places from his youth, encounters Sylvie again, and attempts to reconnect with her. Despite moments of intimacy, he ultimately learns she is to marry another. The story ends with his return to Paris and his continued failed attempts to merge his current desire with past images of love.

Themes include psychological fragmentation, temporal dislocation, and the failure of romantic synthesis. The narrative resists chronological clarity and often blurs distinctions between real and imagined events. The work has been variously interpreted as a pastoral idyll, a meditation on memory, and a document of psychological crisis. Nerval regarded it as one of his best works. Subsequent literary criticism has identified it as a significant precursor to modernist narrative techniques.

Author Details

Gérard de Nerval was the pen-name of Gérard Labrunie (1808-1855), essayist, translator, poet, playwright, and travel writer. He was a major figure during the era of French Romanticism, and is best known for his novellas and poetry, especially the collection Les Filles du feu (The Daughters of Fire), which contained a set of eight novellas, including Sylvie, and a selection of poems including El Desdichado. Nerval played a major role in introducing French readers to the works of German Romantic authors, including Goethe and Schiller, initially through his prose translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust. His later work, merging poetry and journalism in a fictional manner, influenced Proust, particularly Sylvie which explored the theme of time lost and recalled. His last novella, Aurélia ou Le Rêve et La Vie, which drew on his interest in the significance of dreams, also influenced André Breton and the Surrealist movement.

At college, he met Théophile Gautier, who became a lifelong friend, and later, in 1836, accompanied Gautier on a trip to Belgium. In 1840 he took over the latter’s column in La Presse.

He began to experience serious mental health problems in 1841. In December 1842, Nerval departed for the Near East, later publishing articles deriving from his travels, and the work translated here, Voyage en Orient, which expanded on his journey. Between 1844 and 1847, Nerval travelled to Belgium, the Netherlands, and London, writing about his experiences. At the same time, he was writing novellas and opera librettos, and translating the poems of his friend Heinrich Heine, publishing a selection of translations in 1848. His last years were troubled by severe emotional and financial problems, and he sadly took his own life in January 1855. In 1867, Gautier wrote a touching reminiscence of him, ‘La Vie de Gérard’, which was included in his Portraits et Souvenirs Littéraires of 1875.

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Kline, A. S.

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