Chapter I

Of Gérard de Nerval, whose true name was Gérard Labrunie, it has been finely said: "His was the most beautiful of all the lost souls of the French Romance."(*) Born in 1808, he came to his death by suicide one dark winter night towards the end of January.

The story of this life and its tragic finale was well known at the time to all men of letters,--Théophile Gautier, Paul de Saint-Victor, Arsène Houssaye,--friends who never forgot the young poet even after he went the way that madness lies. For it was insanity,--a nostalgia of the soul always imminent--that led him into the squalid _Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne_, in which long forgotten corner of old Paris his dead body was found one bleak belated dawn. And this was forty years ago.

In later days Maxime du Camp and Ludovic Halévy have retold with great feeling the history of Gérard, his early triumphs, his love for Jenny Colon,--the Aurélie of these _Souvenirs du Valois_,--and how at last life's scurrile play was ended.

(*) See _A Century of French Verse_, translated and edited by William John Robertson (4to, London, 1895).