SOURCE: "The 'Last Madness' of Gérard de Nerval," The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 131-38.

In the following essay, Warren surveys prominent themes and images in Nerval's poetry and fiction.

When Gérard de Nerval hanged himself on the night of 25 January 1855 in Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, a sordid Parisian alley, he inscribed himself into an already hackneyed romantic mythology which mingles poetry with death in a peculiar eros. In life he had already demonstrated himself picturesquely mad, walking his pet lobster on a blue ribbon in the park of the Palais-Royal; his death by hanging from the Queen of Sheba's garter (an old apron string), was more fantastic still. His contemporaries were not slow to respond to the event. In that year Gustave Dor created his famous lithograph depicting the slightly paunchy poet dangling from a grille fence while his female soul, of...