Reading Order
Sylvie Reading Order
Sylvie (1853) by Gérard de Nerval is the most perfect prose poem in French Romantic literature — a 50-page novella narrating a night-time journey from Paris to the Valois countryside to find Sylvie, a peasant girl loved in childhood, which becomes simultaneously a real journey through space and a journey backward through time and memory. The narrator is caught between three women: Aurélie (the actress he worships from a theatre seat but has never spoken to), Sylvie (the real childhood companion now becoming a bourgeoise), and Adrienne (a girl of noble birth glimpsed in a moonlit game who becomes the archetype behind both). The novella is famous for its temporal disorientation — the narrator loses track of which year, which night, which version of the past he is inhabiting — and for the absolute beauty of its prose, which Proust identified as one of the primary sources of À la recherche du temps perdu. Nerval suffered from recurring mental illness (he had his first breakdown in 1841) and Sylvie is partly the account of how memory and fantasy compensate for a reality that cannot satisfy: the women are always more perfect in recollection than in encounter. Nerval hanged himself in January 1855, eighteen months after Sylvie was published; Aurélia (1855), his posthumous prose account of his madness and visions, is the companion text.
Where to start
Sylvie
Complete Sylvie Book List
- 1Buy
Sylvie
Gérard de Nerval·1853·Best read in a bilingual edition; the translation matters enormously for a text this dependent on prose rhythm; the Richard Sieburth translation (Penguin) is excellent - 2Buy
Aurélia
Gérard de Nerval·1855·The posthumous companion: Nerval's account of his madness, written in the periods of lucidity between his breakdowns; the most remarkable account of mental illness as spiritual vision in French literature - 3Buy
Les Chimères
Gérard de Nerval·1854·The twelve sonnets published at the end of Les Filles du feu (which includes Sylvie): compressed to the point of obscurity, they are the poetic equivalent of the prose poems of Sylvie; 'El Desdichado' and 'Artémis' are the summit of French Romantic poetry - 4Buy
À la recherche du temps perdu
Marcel Proust·1913·The 20th-century continuation that Proust himself identified: the Overture of Swann's Way (the narrator in bed, recovering the past through involuntary memory) is the Sylvie method applied to 3,000 pages; Proust read and reread Sylvie and it saturates the texture of the Recherche - 5Buy
Le Grand Meaulnes
Alain-Fournier·1913·The 20th-century French closest equivalent: the lost domain of Alain-Fournier's novel is the Valois of Sylvie — a perfect place visited once in childhood and never recovered, sought through adult life as a form of salvation
Sylvie — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sylvie autobiographical?
Substantially — the Valois countryside is the region of Nerval's childhood, and the three women are based on real women (Jenny Colon was the actress he loved from a distance for years). But Sylvie is not memoir: it is the transformation of autobiography into prose poetry, and what interests Nerval is not the facts of his life but the texture of memory and the structure of desire that autobiography reveals when pressed.
Why is the time frame of Sylvie so confusing?
Intentionally so. The narrator moves between three or four time frames — present Paris, the night journey, childhood memories, and memories of adolescence — without always marking the transitions. Nerval is rendering the actual experience of memory, in which the past is not sequential but simultaneous: all the versions of Sylvie and Aurélie and Adrienne are equally present to the consciousness that desires them.
Who is Adrienne in Sylvie?
Adrienne is the figure glimpsed only once in a childhood moonlit game — a girl of noble birth who sang a beautiful song and whom the narrator saw enter a convent. She becomes the archetype behind all the other women: the narrator suspects that he loved Aurélie because she reminded him of Adrienne, and that his love for both was really a displaced religious veneration for the unattainable. Adrienne is never seen again; she may have died in the convent.
What is the Valois in Sylvie?
The Valois is the region northeast of Paris (roughly what is now the Oise and Aisne departments) where Nerval spent his childhood. In Sylvie it is consistently idealized: the peasant dances, the old châteaux, the Rousseauian natural community of the village are presented as a lost paradise that the narrator's night journey is trying to recover. The actual Valois of 1853 is becoming bourgeois and industrial, and the gap between memory and return is part of the novella's melancholy.
What is the connection between Sylvie and Proust?
Proust identified Sylvie as one of the most important sources of À la recherche du temps perdu and analyzed it in an essay (Sur la lecture, later published in Contre Sainte-Beuve). Both texts are organized around involuntary memory, the gap between the thing remembered and the thing encountered, and the quest to recover a past that cannot be recovered. The famous madeleine passage is partly Proustian Sylvie.
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