Sylvie Reading Order

Sylvie (1853) by Gérard de Nerval is the most perfect of his prose works and one of the most beautiful short fictions in the French tradition — a novella of memory, enchantment, and the impossibility of recovering a world that belonged to an earlier self. The unnamed narrator, an actor or journalist in Paris, reads a newspaper in a theater box and is suddenly transported by a name and a memory back to his childhood in the Valois countryside: to the three women who have structured his emotional life, the actress Aurélie (whom he loves from a distance in the theater), the village girl Sylvie (whom he loved as a child and who has since married), and the ghost Adrienne (a girl from an aristocratic family whom he saw dance as a child and who entered a convent and died there). The novella interweaves present and past, reality and memory, the Paris of the 1850s and the Valois of the 1820s, with a dreamlike fluency that makes the temporal transitions almost impossible to track — and this formal quality enacts its theme: the impossibility of knowing, from inside a recovered memory, whether what you are recovering is what actually happened or what you have remade it into in the years since. Sylvie is the precursor in the French tradition to Proust's treatment of involuntary memory, and it is also the work that most directly influenced Le Grand Meaulnes: Alain-Fournier explicitly acknowledged it.