English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Nerval's death and the program of the session 0:00 Don't wait for me tonight, for the night will be black and white. On January 26, 1855, at dawn, a man is found hanged, on Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, near the Place du Châtelet in Paris. He is said to have hanged himself at exactly the spot where the Place du Souffleur at the Théâtre du Châtelet now stands. The first checks establish that it is a certain Gérard Labrunie, 47 years old, of no fixed abode, son of a military doctor, born on May 22, 1808 in that same parish of Saint-Merri, better known under the pen name Gérard de Nerval.
0:46 And in the text we are going to look at, its main subject is how to find lodging in Paris, I'll just say it plainly. Where shall we want to stay? Every word is simple. Where shall we want to stay? That means, first of all, that we are on the move. Until we find a place where we say to ourselves, well, maybe this is where I should settle.
1:23 You see? Here I'm insisting for now just on the word "stroll," but isn't memory also a stroll through time? I move away from the present moment to go and look into the past, in search of lost time. From the moment people painted on the walls of caves, that meant they had already decided that drinking, eating, sleeping — a beast could do that.
2:04 To be human is to aspire still further beyond. That is what is at stake in "Where shall we want to stay?" Good evening everyone, good evening dear friends, good evening dear comrades. Today we're going to take a walk. And already, all reverie is a kind of walk somewhere, a displacement, you see.
2:38 It's not very stable, by definition. We are going to do a reading of a text by Nerval which is on the whole short, just a few pages, but you should at least know this about it: it is Nerval's last completed text. He was still working on corrections to it when he was found hanged, as you know, on the night of January 25 to 26, 1855, very close to what we would today call Châtelet–Les Halles, in Paris.
3:10 And even — though is this already rumor, legend? — it's said that they found, because the exact spot, the little back street where he hanged himself, at a railing, an air vent, basically a sewer grate. It was in a sordid alley, which Baudelaire alludes to, which has since disappeared. That's what should be remembered for now: an alley that disappeared during Haussmann's works, very shortly after Nerval hanged himself. That is the period Baudelaire alludes to in one of his most beautiful poems, called "The Swan."
3:42 It's about the bird, isn't it — the swan, in "The Flowers of Evil." "Old Paris is no more (the form of a city / changes faster, alas, than a mortal's heart)." There, I say this to those who get annoyed — I'm one of them sometimes, and rightly so — they never stop doing roadworks in Paris, you can't find your way anymore. You see this isn't new. Paris has been transforming for 2,000 years.
4:12 Well, its greatest transformation was probably that one, Haussmann's, in the 1860s. Since it disappeared, and since at the time there wasn't yet what there is today, the Théâtre du Châtelet, a rumor has it that he hanged himself at exactly the spot where the Place du Souffleur at the Théâtre du Châtelet now stands. Given the importance of the undertaking, the Nervalian dream of one day succeeding in the theater, there's clearly a legendary connotation to it, but never mind — in any case, it's in that neighborhood.
4:45 He hadn't gone out thinking he was going to hang himself, but before deciding to hang himself, he had knocked on the door of a night shelter. And in the text we are going to look at, its main subject is "How to find lodging in Paris?" I'll just say it plainly. It's the first sentence of the text, you'll see: "It is becoming truly difficult to find lodging in Paris." Here again, I smile because a few of you are thinking that the sentence is still relevant today. It's hard to be young and not very well-off these days and want to try to live within the city walls of Paris.
5:25 So it's becoming almost a privilege. You see that this too is nothing new. So just before, he had knocked at a night shelter, so he was homeless. He was reduced — since he speaks very little about it, he has great modesty on that score — to such material precariousness, meaning it was a night of bitter cold, all the witnesses say so, it went below minus ten, and he was refused entry at the door.
5:55 And it's this refusal that triggered the self-destructive impulse. It's always the same themes we're going to find, in contexts where, truly, we wouldn't have expected to find them. That's the best way to make us grasp the depth of the stakes behind these themes. Each time we've seen one facet of these stakes. Not least — I say this for free for now — this theme of pure sound, of the voice, of musical resonance, of what is perceived neither by the intellect nor by the eye, but by the ear.
6:33 Already, the simple fact that the title of the text we are going to read is "Promenade et souvenir" — I'm insisting here only on "promenade," but isn't memory also a stroll through time? I move away from the present moment to go and look into the past, in search of lost time. In both cases there is movement. So it's already akin to the musical thing.
7:07 Music is not a statue. It's not a house. A house, a statue, is magnificent, it's like castles, but it's not of the same order. Music is better suited to expressing things that follow an unfolding, a deployment. It's a bit like filming a flower on fast-forward, seeing it grow like that, you see? And all the branching it can put out as it grows — a plant, I mean a flower.
7:37 This theme of the voice is not obvious; Nerval doesn't bring it up right away. He'll speak of it a few pages after the beginning. We'll have all the leisure to slow down at that point on this crucial passage. I'll put it in perspective with other passages, other works by the same Nerval, in such a way as to create what in music is called a counterpoint. A second voice, a third voice — I'm going to superimpose three texts which have this in common, that the author Nerval is here literally fascinated by the very particular nature of what he hears.
8:15 and each time, it's a female voice. Not always — there is one exception. Well, most of the time it's a female voice. Let me open a parenthesis: I'm thinking of one time precisely, in Promenades et souvenirs, we'll see this, where it's a man who picks up a guitar in a public place and starts singing a romance. And for once it was a man, Nerval finds he resembles his father, he finds him graceful, he says "if I were a woman, I would have found him charming."
8:45 So you see, it is indeed a voice that is connoted, all the same, with femininity rather than with woman. Woman — everyone can have their own opinion on the question. We'll start with women. But femininity is a fantasy, is a reality — in any case, let's be clear on the distinction. I'll superimpose, I tell you right away, a text borrowed from another work called "Les nuits d'octobre."
9:15 All of these are very short works. Let me take this chance to tell you that for those who'd like to dive in, just type Nerval, Wikisource. That's enough. And there you have all these works. Today we're going to dwell on Promenades et souvenirs. It's in the list of works on Wikisource. So I'll quote you an extract from "Les nuits d'octobre," "The October Nights" — not "La nuit d'octobre," which is a poem by Alfred de Musset. And an extract from Sylvie. Sylvie, which is a novella in its own right from "Les filles du feu."
9:46 There you go — that's surely the work that did the most for the reputation of Nervalian prose. And Proust held a genuine cult for it. A little novella, just a few pages. Each time, these are short texts, very short. We're always tracking the same quarry. No, don't worry, it's not to kill it. It's to get at least a photo of it, a trace of it in our memory, on film, in our thought. I don't know, that would already be…
10:17 I quoted Rimbaud last time, who said "To understand my word, it must flee and fly." If we could have a small snapshot of what we've been searching for throughout Mignon, that silence which seems to step back from all those sounds that make themselves heard — the crackling of the telephone, the sound of the castle bell, the voice of Mignon herself, which is a song at the end, as Goethe tells us. Let us continue, though I would no longer say a tracking, I would say this quest.
"Where would we want to remain?": Hölderlin and Faust 10:53 I'll move straight on to reading the beginning of "Promenade et souvenir." I had warned you about the ambivalences of the word "promenade" — in slang, they say "the guy who took us for a walk [promenés]," meaning watch out, you're walking into a trap, all right? There, I'm putting you in the hands of the writer Nerval, and I guarantee you it won't get you sent to the slaughter. Thank you, I'm very glad Pierre-Alain thought to put this as an epigraph like that, from another author — but you see, we're not moving on to something else.
11:30 This is a poet, like Nerval, a generation earlier — German Romanticism being much more precocious than French Romanticism, more than all the others too, along with English Romanticism. First point in common: a poet. Second point in common: Nerval says in a poem, "For the muse made me one of the sons of Greece." Nerval is fascinated by the mythologies of the various religions. Hölderlin is also known, isn't he, for having been haunted by the model of the ancient city — but he didn't stop there.
12:04 And thirdly, both died mad. I know nothing about that, I'm not a clinician, I won't rule on the substance of it. Well, officially — but in both cases, the medical world and those around them, isn't that so? So it's not entirely by chance if I place first this admirable text by Nerval, which is a prose text, beneath an excerpt from a poem by Hölderlin that poses this strange question, "Where shall we want to stay?"
12:41 Every word is simple, there's not a single abstract, philosophical, or scientific, or technical word there. Where are we going? But you see, right away we say, this is a strange way of putting the question. All right? Where shall we want to stay? That means, first, that we are wandering about, until we find a place where we say to ourselves, "Well, maybe this is where I should settle." You see? There, where we are again — first connection with Mignon, you see that we're dealing with the same themes.
13:18 Mignon is a work, a character forged by Goethe, the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister. But Goethe is above all known as the author of Faust. Now Faust — what is his deal with the devil? Let's get to it. The devil, for his part, I've told you, we know right away what he wants, it's always the same thing: the soul. Every time there's a pact with the devil, on the devil's side we know what he wants, it's the soul of the poor sinner that we are. But Faust would be ready to give it to him, on the one condition he sets, the only thing he asks in exchange — but it's no small thing.
13:58 It's dizzying in depth. So now, if we translate this philosophically, it's: listen, devil, if you manage — there are ways, ways of procuring pleasure, enjoyment. So, if you manage to give me such pleasure, such happiness, that I see myself in an eternity of that happiness without ever tiring of it, to the point that I could say at that very instant, "Verweile doch, du bist so schön" — "Stay awhile, you are so beautiful" — speaking to the instant, because then, you have my soul. Precisely, the devil has great difficulty finding a way to satisfy — not the individual Faust, who wouldn't have started to be seen as some strange fellow, a bit neurotic, like an accursed poet — no, it's you and me.
14:37 That reminds us, philosophically, doesn't it, of the infinity of human desire. Good news for the unions: every time their boss tells them, "That's enough, that'll do," there's no reason for it, there's no assignable limit. From the moment people painted on the walls of caves, that meant they had already decided that drinking, eating, sleeping — a fly could do that. To be human is to aspire still further beyond.
15:07 That is what is at stake in "Where shall we want to stay?" Where might we have the chance perhaps to quench this infinite desire? I'll move on to Nerval's text. I won't read it all the way through, but well, it says "excerpt," that's why. But for now, I'm not skipping the beginning. The beginning is this, you see, it starts, as I told you, in a way more familiar to each of us: "It is becoming truly difficult to find lodging in Paris."
Reading of the beginning: finding lodging in Paris 15:44 "I have never been so convinced of it as in the last two months, having arrived from Germany after a brief stay in a suburban town" — what is moving here? He was thus roaming about in Germany — those who have followed the lecture series I gave, grouped under the title of the novella Angélique... We saw that Angélique, the first novella in Les filles du feu, begins with "In 1851, I was passing through Frankfurt." You see, so we're still on the move.
16:16 Except that — I quote another sentence of Nerval's — "With time, the passion for great journeys dies away." He made his name in the world of letters with Voyage en Orient — there, that's not a stroll in the outskirts of Paris, nor even in Germany, nor in the outskirts of Paris, nor in the Valois, the region where Rousseau's grave is and where he spent a childhood, which is his mother's region by the way, Mortefontaine — nor Germany, but straight out to the Orient. That's what made him famous. But as he ventured, at last, to publish works — because for a long time he only did reviews of plays, write-ups, as they say in the theater pages of newspapers.
17:02 Little by little, as he says, the circle narrows with time, the passion for great journeys dies away. As if the journey were becoming more and more inward, and as though it were not only in kilometers that one could measure the immense adventure that every displacement unfolds — whereas at the outset, what could be more prosaic, more mundane, and less mysterious than the problem of finding lodging, particularly in Paris.
17:34 "I have never been so convinced of it as in the last two months, having arrived from Germany after a brief stay in a suburban town, I sought out for myself a more secure dwelling than the previous ones, one of which was located..." — my dwellings, what an itinerant life, how many times he must have had to leave a dwelling, either because — I told you — Haussmann's great works destroyed the place where he had finally found lodging, or he no longer had the means to pay his rent, since he's very evasive on that score.
18:07 I continue: "...a more secure dwelling than the previous ones, one of which was located on the Place du Louvre and the other on the Rue du Mail. I go back only six years." Yes, already, how texts call out to one another without having agreed on it. Nerval isn't thinking of Baudelaire, Baudelaire isn't thinking of Nerval when he writes the poem I pointed out earlier, "The Swan." I can tell you now the gist of it, because it relates to what Nerval says about a dwelling that was located on the Place du Louvre.
Baudelaire's Le Cygne and Paris before Haussmann 18:41 At the time, of course, there was no pyramid — that dates from the Mitterrand generation. No, nor was there the great esplanade, you know, the one between the Louvre and the Tuileries. It was all... If I recall Baudelaire's words: "I see only in my mind that camp of huts, / that pile of chipped capitals and shafts, / the weeds, the great blocks greened by pooled water, / and, glittering in the windows, the jumbled bric-a-brac."
19:13 It was a bit of a mess, a bit like the Clignancourt flea market. There, right in the center of Paris, at the Louvre, now every square centimeter costs a fortune. And it's that which was cleared away in Haussmann's time, to make a clean sweep and create, you know, the Carrousel and that immense axis running from the far end of the Louvre, from the Grande Galerie, and even from... following the line of the Seine as with Notre-Dame, so that you can see the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, and on the 15th of August, the sun setting between the two feet of the Arc de Triomphe, and beyond, even now, the towers of La Défense.
19:46 Paris has always unfolded along this axis, at least as far as the east-west direction is concerned. Now, precisely, the gist of Baudelaire's poem is that, while walking there, there was a traveling menagerie, a pitiful little circus, and he saw a swan that had just escaped from its cage, a swan on the Parisian pavement — a swan is made to float, to swim, to ply the transparent waters, so transparent that it need only gaze upon its own reflection there — what a fine image of narcissism, which is why the swan plays such a great role in the symbolic order.
20:27 I'm no zoologist, I'm no ornithologist, I say this because Bachelard, who did admirable work on this — yes, he's not only someone who reflected on the sciences, on physics, he's not only an immense epistemologist, he also produced a well-known series linked to the four elements, and the roles they play in literature, within the framework of what he himself calls the new notion, material imagination: Water and Dreams, Air and Dreams, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, and Earth and Reveries of Will — tied to the four elements.
21:01 I'm thinking of Water and Dreams, at a certain point where he speaks precisely of the swan as an image of nudity, as the least unconsciously so — that's why it's an animal that fascinates poetry, painting to such a degree; look at how many times the myth of Zeus, Jupiter, transforming himself into a swan to better subjugate, seduce, and have his way, so to speak, with the nymph Leda, who was bathing among the reeds and irises at the water's edge — if this image of the swan could be so pervasive throughout the history of the imaginary, whether in painting or poetry, or even mythology, I say this to those who have the symbolic intuition that the Valkyries, originally in Germanic mythology, the Valkyries are swans — before they ride, they fly through the air, like that, it's an aerial ride, they fly through the air and often they go into the water, they are creatures of air and water, the swan is both — the swan, we always imagine it near water, but at the same time, from time to time, they take flight
22:11 from one pond to another, especially in the Nordic countries, where you can see magnificent squadrons of swans, as I saw long ago. This swan, for Baudelaire, is the image of exile, a swan that is not in the water but in the dust, in the hubbub and the traffic jams of Paris — but what a tragic vision: "near a dry gutter, / the beast, opening its beak, / bathed its wings nervously in the dust," it's dreadful, and it becomes a metaphor for exile in general. The poem was dedicated to Victor Hugo, whom Baudelaire did not hold dear, but whom he admired for the role he played while in exile, Hugo over there, on the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, because he had mocked Napoleon the Little.
A view of trees: the pastoral of memory 23:02 And so it happens that it's precisely in this neighborhood where Baudelaire saw the swan — all this just before Haussmann's works — that Nerval says he lived. "I go back only six years... evicted from the first with 20 francs in compensation, which I neglected, I don't know why, to go and collect from the city." The municipality, the city hall of Paris, had promised 20 francs if he cleared out, isn't that right?
23:32 Quite a small compensation, wasn't it? "Evicted from the first with 20 francs in compensation, which I neglected, I don't know why, to go and collect from the city. I had found, in the second, what one can hardly find anymore in the center of Paris." So, that's settled — I had that right in the center of Paris. What? A view of two or three trees occupying a certain space, which allows one both to breathe and to relax the mind, by looking at something other than a checkerboard of dark windows.
24:07 So, I'm telling you in advance, Promenades et souvenirs is not the Voyage en Orient with initiation into forgotten sects, either in the orbit of Islam, or into even older signs, right? We think we're going to relive the magic of the Old Testament. No, no, nothing fabulous. As we've seen, it's about finding lodgings in Paris.
24:37 So people ask me, why are you dragging us into something so uninteresting? But that's exactly the miracle of Nerval's prose — whatever he talks about, even a few flowers gossiping, even a single flower hanging on the third floor of a Parisian building, we simply can't do without it. So, there, you see, he evokes this lodging he had right in the center of Paris and he offers us this improvised pastoral of memory, right? He recalls a lodging that adjoined the Louvre.
25:11 So, a certain space that allows one both to breathe and to relax the mind by looking at something other than a chessboard of dark windows where pretty figures only appear... well, not a car, I mean an automobile. There were no combustion engines anywhere in Paris, but it was already black because it was the charcoal that fouled everything at that time. And believe me, it was far more polluting, charcoal. All of Paris was black as coal.
25:41 When Rousseau — now Rousseau is well before all that, even well before the industrial revolution in France, Rousseau — when Rousseau is invited by the Marquis de Girardin to come die, so to speak, well, invited to relax at his home, to reside at Ermenonville, he doesn't yet know that this is where he'll die happy. He thanks him in a letter where he says, 'What struck me is the beauty of your trees.' Ermenonville — in Paris, all the trees are black. You see!
26:11 Already, there's not yet industrial action. I too dislike a windowpane being black and trees being black. But before saying it's the fault of industry in general and of man in general and of industrial man in particular, we have to look twice. I would even say that industry made it so we no longer need wood to heat and light ourselves. And believe me, that's ecological progress. A chessboard of black windows — I'll finish the sentence — where pretty figures only appear by exception.
26:47 Nerval tries — this is a Parisian speaking. Flirting a little with the idea. 'I respect the private life of my neighbors. I am not one of those who examine with spyglasses the curves of a woman going to bed, or catch with the naked eye the silhouettes peculiar to the incidents and accidents of married life.' You'd think you were watching an excerpt from a masterpiece of cinema that you know. Most of you connoisseurs know Hitchcock's Rear Window. If I told you the pitch...
27:18 It's a guy who's had a little accident, has a leg in a cast, and is at home, and all he has for entertainment from his window is watching a bit of what's happening in the apartments across from his window. And with less than that — I said an hour and a half at least, or two hours of film on that — I'd get bored. But you know it's a gripping film — I love it, don't you?
27:49 Yes. So, 'or who catch with the naked eye the silhouettes peculiar to the incidents and accidents of married life.' In short, all this is material that only concerns those who live in the big cities that were new at the time, that had been brought together by Europe's rapid schooling in general, and France's and England's in particular. 'I prefer such a horizon, ideal for the pleasure of the eyes, as Fénelon would say, where one can enjoy either a sunrise or a sunset, but more particularly the sunrise.'
Birdsong, bel canto, and correspondences 28:25 'The sunset doesn't bother me much, I'm sure to encounter it anywhere but at home.' That's an indirect way of course of telling me: I'm a night owl and I always go to bed rather late. So for the sunrise it's different: 'I like to see the sun carve angles on the walls, to hear outside the chirping of birds, even if they be mere common sparrows.' Grétry, a minor opera composer of the time — but you see how it's already starting to circulate, the chirping of birds.
28:59 Goethe says Mignon didn't speak, she chirped — her language barely comprehensible, but to the ear in any case it was delightful. And Kafka, when he tries to characterize the sound, the crackling of the telephone — that is, the voice of the castle, the voice of the end of all quest — says it sounded as if it were the gathering of a million children's voices at once, very close and very far. So here, 'to hear outside the chirping of birds' doesn't give us any more detail than that: you see the sun rise in the morning, you hear birdsong, even mere common sparrows — he doesn't leave his theme of the bird. Grétry, opera composer, I come back to him — so someone writing at the time when it's the height of bel canto, let's say the first third, first half, and especially the first third of the 19th century, which culminates in a somewhat elegiac and melancholic genre — it's Italian.
30:09 Bel canto — there, the text, the words, matter little, I mean, because you stay on one syllable for a long time; there are splendors, and it depends a lot — you might imagine even more than in any other repertoire — on the quality of the performer. But when we speak of birds, we mean of course the sopranos, the performers of female roles, and so in the melancholic genre it would be Bellini, right, La Norma, which now mostly serves to advertise coffee or chocolate — the aria Casta Diva doesn't bother anyone much — or, in the comic style, Rossini, who was at the height of his glory at that time, eclipsing Beethoven's glory in Vienna. And then, I recommend him to you, I don't say this with contempt, Rossini — if you could set lime into music, you know, a sorbet, he loved that, Rossini, a lime sorbet — if you could make a music that would be to the ear the equivalent, as an impression, of what limes are to the tongue and to the taste buds, I say this
31:19 because there's a beautiful line in Baudelaire's Correspondances: 'There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh, sweet as oboes, green as meadows.' So there is something that for the ear would be the timbre of the oboe, for the eye would be the green of meadows, and for touch or for smell — I don't know — freshness, he says, children's flesh for instance. But this something — is it a smell, a color, a sound? Of course not. So there is something that isn't sensible — we're in full Platonic philosophy here — something that is the object of no sense, but which circulates, good sense, by creating a bond of analogy, of correspondence, to use Baudelaire's term, and which unifies these apparently unrelated things: the green of meadows, children's flesh, the sound of the oboe. So Grétry offered a louis to hear a warbling trill — you see, I was sure he'd cite the composer, and Grétry was there to bring back the theme of the bird.
32:29 And we even say that the Castafiore in Tintin — her press nickname in the newspapers is supposed to be the Milanese Nightingale. So Grétry offered a louis, a gold louis, to hear a warbling trill; I, Nerval, doesn't say he's broke, but — conditional — 'if I had them, I would give 20 francs for a blackbird, the 20 francs the city of Paris still owes me.' Good, so we're going to witness — I tell you in advance because I'm going to skip certain passages — those of you who followed with me Nerval's journey through Angélique will recall that we start from Germany in 1851, I passed through Frankfurt, so we start from the East, we arrive in Paris, and from Paris, not finding the book he's looking for — I'll go quickly — we find ourselves in the forests, the ponds and the mists of the Valois. I tell you in advance
Montmartre, a rural paradise in the middle of Paris 33:41 that we're going to do the same thing — we're going to arrive at the same destination, Valois, Chantilly, Ermenonville — but coming from an entirely different starting point this time. From Paris — you see, for now we're in Paris, looking for lodgings in Paris, but we're going to take a turn, we're going to get the idea of going to the suburbs, quite simply. He doesn't say it outright, but basically, in Paris, everything he found that he'd really like was too expensive, right, he'd thought of Montmartre. So I won't go through every place he tries first in Paris, but I wouldn't want to skip Montmartre, because it'll give an idea of the charm of Nerval's prose — these aren't vague impressions, right, it's quite precise. He talks about the Butte Montmartre, which at the time bordered practically on the countryside, right — beyond Montmartre it was already somewhat the outskirts, but not the hyper-urbanized zone of now, because north of Montmartre there's now nothing but Seine-Saint-Denis, which is a succession of municipalities, towns, right, with very dense urban housing, whereas at the time it was mostly a region
34:51 in between the city and the countryside proper. Let's look together at an excerpt of how he describes the Butte Montmartre: 'There are windmills there, taverns, arbors, rustic Elysian fields and silent lanes lined with thatched cottages, barns and gardens — all that' — we don't need to go far, we're in Paris, he's talking about Montmartre. The way he talks about it is as if we'd made a leap in time in a film, as if we'd left this world of modern, industrial, buzzing, crowded life to suddenly find a rural peace, a silence, a tranquility that could only be found in the countryside — an almost paradisiacal rurality — the Elysian fields being the paradise of Greek mythology. 'There are windmills there, taverns' — so places, he's not talking about workshops, he's talking about places where you relax — 'and arbors'
36:01 'Give me back the trellis where the vine-leaf mingles with the rose' — 'rustic Elysian fields and silent lanes lined with thatched cottages, barns and lush gardens' — because barns weren't things you had in Paris — 'green plains cut by precipices' — good grief, we're between the Alps and the Himalayas now — 'where springs filter through the clay, gradually detaching certain islets of greenery where goats frolic' — the goats aren't done yet — 'grazing on the acanthus hanging from the rock,' goats venturing into chasms — there's a fantastical coloring in a few lines — 'little girls' — at the time these were little shepherdesses, they weren't sent to school because there were animals to watch, which I saw south of the Sahara for years, always with a little stick, the shepherd's crook, it's the same the world over — little girls with 'proud eyes and mountain feet' — at Montmartre! No, we're not in Corsica — 'little girls with proud eyes'
37:11 'and mountain feet watch over them' — the goats, playing among themselves. 'We even come across a vineyard, the last of the famous Montmartre vintage' — we barely have time to see a vine before it's already Bacchus and Dionysus, that is, wine, in the colors of the French flag — white, the old Bourbon royal white, nicely flanked, since it's in the middle, by blue and red, the colors of Saint-Denis — that is, the plain bordering Montmartre to the north — Denis being the French form of Dionysus, Bacchus — and the last vineyard that survives in Paris is precisely that of Montmartre. You know that every September there's a little festival for the last vintage. You see: 'We even come across a vineyard, the last of the famous Montmartre vintage, which used to rival, in Roman times, with'
38:21 'Argenteuil and Suresnes' — and yes, now we find on almost every table Côtes du Rhône, Côtes de Provence, and Bordeaux — I couldn't even look for great wines at the time, means didn't allow it, people drank cheap little wines, they called them 'piquettes' — in fact Nerval wrote a poem, an early poem, that reviews almost all the wines harvested around Paris, and among them there's the 'clairet' of Suresnes, you see, it wasn't very red, the clairet of Suresnes, and the 'picton' of Argenteuil, the picton being a bit sour — not great-quality wines. 'Every year this humble hillside loses a row of these stunted vine-stocks that fall into a quarry' — these stories of precipices, of girls with their goats in the chasms — we now see that, symbolically, it also shows the threat of time, of progress, of modernity closing in on one of the last strongholds of a kind of paradisiacal, rural projection of ancient times, right in the heart of the capital. 'Every year this humble hillside'
"I shall never be a property owner": the seafaring man and the riverbank woman 39:31 'loses a row of these stunted stocks that fall into a quarry. Ten years ago I could have acquired it' — the vineyard, I could have acquired it — 'for 3,000 francs; today they're asking 30,000.' You see, nothing's changed, speculation. 'It's the finest viewpoint in the environs of Paris.' There, I wanted to show you how Nerval keeps the reader engaged, right, and then this sentence: 'One must think of it no more, I shall never be a property owner' — it gets serious, well, the tone gets more serious, even if it stays playful, journalistic, but amusing, but serious — that's why I told you how he did it as an SDF, as we'd say today — homeless — since he was refused lodging one night, even with a bit of warmth, a bed, a straw mattress, on a night when it was freezing hard. So these sentences take on a certain resonance: 'I shall never be a property owner,' and that's why, you see, I can tell you
40:41 now, the whole text of Promenades et souvenirs, which is very short, nevertheless I divide it — I propose to divide it — into two parts. There's this whole first part, which we're seeing together for now, which I sum up under the heading, if you like, of nomad or sedentary: where shall we want to stay, when shall we stop wandering, being a nomad in order finally to be sedentary. We can dig deeper into the symbolic order, I'm speaking — it's not just a practical reason, I'm not saying it's not important, it's among the most important, having a home isn't a thing I joke about — no, but I mean, even granting that I have a home, beyond the obvious material reasons — it's not only when it's cold, when it's raining, having shelter, and everything that
41:51 having a home connotes — well, that too, but beyond that, coupled with nomad and sedentary, there's sexuation. You might say, but what's the connection, as we used to say, right, back when the sexes were more, more dichotomized than now — because, thankfully, it's not thanks to the multiplication of jobs that women now access — not that they didn't work before, but it was almost always much lower-status work, laboring work, whether in the countryside milking cows or working in factories, which was awful, and to be paid even less, considerably less than men were. Well, one of the greatest advances of modernity is precisely to have made it so — I even saw, when I was in Côte d'Ivoire, at the Abidjan fishing port, a Soviet trawler where the captain was a woman — not women
43:01 ship captains, one must think of it no more, I shall never be a property owner — where I want to get to is this: when there was this division of the sexes, it was the man who went wandering, who went off to war already, at a great distance, never sure of coming back, or who migrated to go wherever there was work, wages — I'm thinking of my West Africa, where at the start of every dry season, in the Sahelian zone, most of the men are forced to go 400 km south, leaving their wives, their young children who have barely just married, and their parents, to go rent out their arms and legs on the plantations of the better-watered countries to the south, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, etc.
43:49 I say it, the traditional phrase: the seafaring man versus the shore-bound woman, the woman on the shore who awaits the man's return. You know it's said that the women of Cancale never stop — that they have a loud voice, the Cancale women, Cancale, oyster capital — because their husbands, their husbands' main traditional function, for so long — it was terrible — was to go fishing for cod in the icy seas, in the fogs of Newfoundland, up near Labrador, in Canada, closer to Canada, right, and the Great North than to sweet Brittany, the coast of the faithful Armorica. And so, since the men weren't there, the women had learned to run the shop while they were away — they have a loud voice, you see, the seafaring man and the shore-bound woman. So there's that between nomad and sedentary, finding the 'where shall we want to stay,' perhaps where a woman resides
Pompeian villa, fossils, and precarious right 45:00 and which gives me a reason to stop — symbolically it needn't be a woman, it could be a loved one — 'one must think of it no more, I shall never be a property owner, and yet how many times, from the 8th to the 15th of each quarter, near Paris at least, I have sung' — you see, he always takes it in a humorous tone — 'the refrain of Monsieur Vautour,' a popular song of the time about when you can't afford to pay your rent, that's the refrain, you have to stay home, and we stay in the little reverie inspired by the arbors and vines of Montmartre. You see — 'I would have had built' — so there, it's in the imaginary — 'I would have had built in this vineyard so light a structure, a little villa in the style of Pompeii' — so him, who's broke, who doesn't say so, imagines himself as a Roman patrician holed up out there in the countryside, in the proper sense, in Campania, the region of Naples — not Pompeii itself, the region of Naples, which is what gave us the word 'campagne' in French — a little villa
46:11 in the style of Pompeii, with an impluvium — that means the hole in the roof through which the rain flowed and fed a garden — sorry, a basin, excuse me — surrounded by a colonnade where the rooms were arranged — a little villa in the style of Pompeii, quite simple, with an impluvium and a 'cellula,' a little cell — not quite a little room — something like the House of the Tragic Poets. Poor Laviron, dead since then beneath the walls of Rome, had drawn up the plan. To tell the truth, though, there is no property owner at the far end of Montmartre — one cannot legally establish a property there. So at the very moment when he might say — and even if I had the money — here's another threat, another reason he won't be a property owner, at least not there where he'd like, at Montmartre, because — before he says it, I say it — those who walk around Montmartre know it — there are houses there whose walls are held up by props, by wooden beams, right, which threaten to collapse precisely because the slope is so steep, and because the ground — you wonder how your foot doesn't sink into the ground, already in general in Paris, between the metro,
47:21 the gas, the water, the catacombs, the mushroom farms and the mines — there were even mines at Montmartre. So here we are: 'One cannot legally establish a property on land undermined by cavities whose walls are peopled with mammoths and mastodons.' People had only just begun to take an interest in what we now call fossils; soon we'd find the first traces of dinosaurs. It's Buffon, right at the end of the previous century, who first had the intuition here of a theory of evolution — he didn't get, of course, the becoming and adaptation of species to their environment, but still, he had already noticed that the temporal depth of the remains of ancient animals went back much further than generally thought — 'mammoths and mastodons' — strange, this whole passage, in Paris we feel quite far from mammoths and mastodons
48:31 far off in time, I'm not saying — but even in space. 'The commune grants a right of possession that expires after a hundred years' — what's called a 'bail emphytéotique' if you like — 'we are encamped like the Turks, and even the most advanced doctrines' — he's alluding to socialism and communism, the word was rare, it's just starting to spread, this being written in the wake of the events of 1848, the texts of course of the utopians, the Fouriers, but even the Blanquis, who go much further — 'we are encamped like the Turks, and the most advanced doctrines would have trouble contesting so fleeting a right, where inheritance can never long be established.' And the first great move, right: the plan is made, we go from Paris to the suburbs. Why not go live in Versailles or Saint-Germain? The suburbs are even more expensive than Paris. Decidedly, well
From Paris to Saint-Germain: the railway and the names of places 49:42 he talks about Saint-Germain, but by taking a season pass on the railway, one can surely find — this was all new, the railway — one can surely find lodgings in the more deserted or more abandoned of these two towns; in reality, what's half an hour by rail, morning and evening, for two — Paris and Saint-Germain — you have there the resources of a city and you're almost in the country. How many millions of us have worked out their housing plan a bit like that, right? 'You find yourself housed, in effect, at 130 Rue Saint-Lazare; the trip offers only pleasure and is never as tiresome or as tiring as an omnibus ride' — you've heard, the train is less, not really, than the state of the roads was for the stagecoach. 'I found myself very happy with this idea, and I chose Saint-Germain, which for me is a city of memories' — and there, for the first time, he says it's no accident that he's taking Saint-Germain, among all the choices he had around Paris — it's one of those towns enclosed a bit like in Dante's Divine Comedy,
50:52 where the characters we see spend eternity repeating the scene that marked their life, right — Nerval has enclosed large parts of his past, already very Proustian, right, in Saint-Germain, among others. 'What a charming journey' — and there he already begins, and it's one of the charms of his prose too, which Proust will take up, in the second part — the third if we count the first two, that is, Combray, then Un amour de Swann — when we return to the narrator before arriving at À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the only text for which he won the Prix Goncourt, there's a little introduction called 'Noms de pays,' and there are two parts to Noms de pays: there's 'Noms de pays: le pays' that we'll see later — if we say Brittany, it's about speaking of Brittany or Normandy — and then there's 'Noms de pays: le nom,' everything that's in one's head even if one has never been there, everything the name itself suggests, everything associated with the name independent of the thing
52:02 independent of the word, independent of the thing. And well, this kind of poetry, already, of mere place names, is what makes Proust speak of the way by Méséglise or the way by Guermantes — it starts here: 'What a charming journey, Asnières, Chatou, Nanterre and Le Pecq, the Seine three times folded, views of green islands, of plains, woods, chalets and villas to the right,' and it starts again, the string of proper names — 'the hillsides of Colombes, of Argenteuil and of Carrières to the left, Mont Valérien, Bougival, Louveciennes and Marly' — he's in the geographic order, but above all there's a literary order, because you see, the 'i' sound — it's a 'y' — the 'i' sound of Marly comes to light up here the slightly darker syllable of Louveciennes — it's admirably ordered — 'Mont Valérien, Bougival, Louveciennes and Marly, I was returning there'
The quest for lodging becomes a pilgrimage; the woodlice 53:12 like Ravenswood to the castle of his fathers, I had had relatives among the residents of that town — he's evasive — twenty years ago already other inhabitants of the town, in all four tombs — so we understand why he's evasive, it's because of deaths — and here what was merely a search for lodging begins to take on the color of a pilgrimage, it's not about the atmosphere of tombs, there's pilgrimage — 'mingled still with these were memories of love and of festivities dating back to the time of the Bourbons, so that I was by turns happy and sad the whole evening.' So, don't worry, we're not here for — it's not melancholy that will win out when Nerval is wandering like this, he always keeps a little complicity with the reader through humor. 'A vulgar incident came to tear me away from the poetry of these dreams of youth; night having come, after having walked through the streets and squares and greeted dwellings once loved, and cast a last glance at the shores of the pond of Mareil and Chambourcy' — we could go through the string of place names again — 'I had at last taken rest'
54:22 where shall we want to stay — 'I had at last taken rest in a café facing the market square. I was served a mug of beer; there were three woodlice at the bottom.' Even now we always say we eat junk in the modern world, at Franprix, at Casino, they've relaxed all the same — my grandmother, you know, grandmothers are kind-hearted, when the grandson she'd despaired of seeing again, who felt a bit abandoned, suddenly comes to visit, they outdo themselves, grandmothers, and make dishes they never make except to make their grandson happy. But everyday life, you know, the number — look at the figures — the number of severe poisonings, I'm not talking about a mild indigestion, poisoning is a very serious emergency, botulism, botulinum toxin, now it requires an emergency, antibiotics before it's too late — the number of poisonings there used to be when there were only pantries and not yet refrigerators. And there, you see, Saint-Germain,
55:33 the market square, we're not deep in the countryside, not in the mountains, we're — three cockroaches — 'I was served a mug of beer; there were three woodlice at the bottom.' Nerval, much humor and restraint: 'A man who has lived in the Orient is incapable of being affected by such a trifle, I have seen worse.' 'Waiter,' I said, 'it is possible that I like woodlice, but another time, if I ask for some, I should like them served separately' — the joke wasn't new, having already been applied to hairs served on an omelette — you see it's nothing exceptional, all this, but it could still be appreciated at Saint-Germain. So humor upon humor, second-degree, between us, between Parisians — okay, fine, my joke's a bit heavy, but I mean, at Saint-Germain you're not required to have the same finesse of humor as in Paris, and yet we're not far — 'the joke wasn't new, having already been applied to hairs served on an omelette, quite well known in Paris, but it could still be appreciated at Saint-Germain. The regulars, butchers or cattle drovers, found it agreeable.' The waiter answered me — I'm obliged to go all the way there, you'll see why —
The castle under repair: Kafka and the prince of Aquitaine 56:43 'there is one more theme missing, sir; this shouldn't surprise you, we are currently doing repairs on the château.' There's nothing further from Kafka, right, than this stroll with Nerval among the trellises and arbors of Montmartre — we're not in the snow, the mud, the implacable authorities of the castle — but there is a château, there's a château for which repairs are being made. You know the most famous of Nerval's poems, to the point that some know it without even knowing it's Nerval: 'I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower' — the tower, the razed castle, the Prince of Aquitaine, his father was from Agen, the Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower — so everything touching on the destruction of lodging par excellence, not the dream lodging, the castle, its destruction, its razing, or on the contrary its rehabilitation
57:54 its restoration — Nerval is living through the historical period when there's an attempt to exorcize the threats of the nascent proletariat, which had pounded on the table during the French Revolution, especially in Paris, and we're living through the return to law, to gold, to religion, etc. 'Waiter,' I said to him, 'you are more handsome than nature and your conversation charms me, but is it true' — you see, this fascinates him — 'that repairs are being done at the château? So there is a château, sir, has been convinced' — convinced, thanks to your reasoning — 'but are you sure of the fact itself?' You see, he insists even on showing what great news it is to learn that repairs are being made on this château which had been abandoned practically since its construction. 'The papers have spoken of it. Absent from France' — he's in Germany for a long time — 'I could not contest this testimony. The next day I went to the château to see how the restoration was progressing' — he hasn't found, right, he hasn't found 10 square meters in Paris
59:05 probably because it's too expensive, but that he doesn't tell us — and there he is, preoccupied with the restoration of the château built in a D-shape in honor of the fair Diane de Poitiers, as he specifies further on. The sergeant-concierge, the guard, tells him with the smile peculiar to a military man of that rank: 'Sir, only to shore up the foundations of the château, nine million would be needed. Do you bring them?' 'I am used to being astonished at nothing; I do not have them on me, but that could perhaps still be found.' I'm very happy to read you this text at a moment when I'm in an 18-square-meter apartment, right, and being scarcely less broke, but I'm not complaining, I'm doing much better in many ways, I'm much better off in your company already, right, than — I know my life very well, but where I had, like everyone, worries, responsibilities, work — I was hooked, which made me go back to Saint-Germain two days later, I had found the idea — so I'll skip the idea, a subscription appeal for English tourists, let's leave that — anyway, he keeps strolling to Chantilly
A singing society; return to Mignon and Orson Welles 1:00:15 and there he comes across what he calls, I believe, a singing society — there I'm forced to stop, because Nerval stops, nothing stops him like the sound of a voice, of a song. So I come back to my introduction, you see why I couldn't avoid it during the introduction, and why our stroll is far less rambling than it seems, if we stay always on the trail — I'll say the hunt, in a moment — the quest for this voice. Do you remember how it ended, Mignon, the magnificent montage that Pierre-Alain — Pierre-Alain gave us — the final seconds of that jewel of a film, Orson Welles's The Immortal Story, right, where we see the dead billionaire, played by Welles himself — it's still, like Citizen Kane, right — and his man-of-all-work, the little Jewish man, the opposite of the billionaire, who has this spacious house
1:01:25 with this veranda — you see, at the end, the little Jewish man turns — you'll see why I insist on his Jewishness — turns his back on Jeanne Moreau, who watches from afar the lover of one night who has just left after fulfilling her contract, and he speaks to Jeanne Moreau, with his back to her, saying: 'He is dead, Miss Virginie. He could not bear it,' because his desire had been fulfilled, and it's even harder when your desire is fulfilled than when it suffers from a lack — suffering from a lack is painful, but when that lack is filled, it's even more painful. I quote the last words, I don't comment on them, they need no comment, it's magnificent — and at that moment he holds in his hand a shell that the young sailor, the one-night lover, had dropped, which he had — we learn during the film that he had lived, because of a shipwreck, alone on an island for a long time, had almost lost language — there, as it happens, not the language of men — and so he keeps this shell, and it's the last image, the little Jewish man, that is
1:02:35 the Wandering Jew, the nomad, like the Roma, the Wandering Jew, the ghost ship, that ship's captain whom God condemned in the legend to wander the seas endlessly because one day, during a storm, he blasphemed — to punish him, he's condemned to wander the seas without ever being able to land on solid ground. Where shall we want to stay — he's condemned to wander the seas forever; the only exception, every seven years — here I'm in the ghost ship called the Flying Dutchman, for the legend comes from the great, bold navigators that the Dutch were, at a time when they even outdid the English navy, when they were masters of the seas, in the time of Admiral de Ruyter, whose statue stands in Amsterdam — that astonishing little nation, a bit like the Portuguese, right, there aren't many countries that, like Portugal, can boast of naming one of their kings Henry the Navigator — the seafaring man and the shore-bound woman — well, there's the ghost ship, with only one exception:
1:03:46 every seven years he's allowed to land at last on solid ground, and there he must quickly find — because time counts — a woman who will remain his, who swears him fidelity until death — I won't tell you how it ends — so he puts the shell to his ear and says, 'I have already heard this' — you see, the voice, the hunt for pure sound, it's not a language, not words, but it speaks — 'I have already heard this, a very long time ago,' he says. There, that's for the time; and then the film's last two words: 'But where' — where — and the word 'End' appears on the screen. All that to introduce you — we're not there yet, we still have Nerval's humor, but you see that this humor is for him a way of exorcizing themes that turn into obsession through their recurrence.
Saint-Germain, La Ronde, and the timbre of young girls 1:04:56 their endless return, I'm not making detours, on the contrary I spend my time always doing a kind of simple eternal return; it's very rare for an inhabitant of Saint-Germain to come to Paris, some of them don't make that trip once in ten years even though it's a quarter of an hour away. Foreign families also live there among themselves, there are quite a few exiled Scots after the bloody struggle between the English royal family and Mary Stuart and the ruling family of Scotland, they came to take refuge — the Scots and the French matched each other in their time against perfidious Albion. Foreign families also live there among themselves, of course aristocratic families, with the familiarity that exists in spa towns — it's not the water, it's the pure air that people come to Saint-Germain to seek. There are charming health houses — the man who writes this is a man who was locked up several times in psychiatric hospitals — there are charming health houses there inhabited by people in very good health
1:06:06 but tired of the buzzing and senseless bustle of the capital. The garrison, which was once the bodyguard and is today the Guard's cuirassiers — there are still uniforms — is perhaps not unrelated to the presence of some young beauties there. That reminds me of another film, I'm jumping from one register to another, one of my favorite films — but I'm not here to tell you my tastes, still, I think of the 1950s when that film by Max Ophüls came out, called La Ronde, which is a series of sketches, isn't it, where a couple — well, the couples form and break apart, La Ronde de l'amour, that's this film, I can't help it because it's a kind of professional deformation, it's the subject of our audio text, which means sometimes maybe I overstate the quality of a film, I'm told it's a cult film, but anyway sometimes I find the film wonderful because of its music, and that's where there's that kind of haunting waltz
1:07:25 La Ronde. At the beginning, there's Simone Signoret who is very young, isn't she? And the narrator, the one who assigns the roles to all these couples, plays a prostitute, doesn't he?
1:07:57 Who is there, not far from the barracks. And you hear a bugle. And he says to her, "Do you hear?" And she says, "Yes, there are always soldiers." The Guard's cuirassiers, their presence is perhaps not unrelated to the residence of some young beauties, girls or widows, whom one meets on horseback or on donkey, on the road to the lodges or to the Château du Val. In the evening, the shops light up on rue de Paris, that's the main street, it's not much of a street.
1:08:31 And on rue au Pain, people chat first at the doorway. It's the same "people" as in Montmartre. It's not the same blow. It becomes light. People laugh. They even sing. There we are, we've arrived. The accent of the voices is quite distinct from that of Paris. Good heavens, we're at the gates of Paris, and there's already a different accent. The young girls have pure, well-pitched voices. And it starts to characterize the timbre of the voice. The young girls have pure, well-pitched voices, as in mountain regions.
1:09:04 Good heavens, you see the little girls who used to tend goats in the ravines, in the water, the springs filtering through the clay of the Montmartre hill. Here we are again, as if transported to a kind of imaginary altitude, aren't we? The young girls have pure, well-pitched voices, as in mountain regions. Passing along the church street, I heard singing at the back of a little café. I'm showing you here that texts obey a logic down to every comma.
1:09:38 When you look closely — I'll go quickly because I don't want to lead you around in a perfidious way, that is, by devouring all your time. As I often like to say, as a joke: the only difference between mathematics and poetry — poetry in the broad sense here, including poetic prose — is that poetry is an exact science. I'm not saying a word against mathematics, on the contrary, what makes the greatness of mathematics is that it is less exact in the ordinary sense.
1:10:11 When you think about it, they're much more pragmatic, much more flexible, much more ingenious and inventive. And Kant made an immense advance when he showed that mathematics is not the domain of analysis but always presupposes at every moment a synthetic aim, not even an analysis. I won't dwell on this too long, we'll have time to draw those conclusions. But you see how this all links together, suddenly we already see a structural analogy, an invariant between the accent of the girls that recalls the mountain and the shepherdesses of the butte, the mount of martyrs.
1:10:54 I heard, passing along the church street, I heard singing at the back of a little café. You see, that's exactly what creates the continuity and diverts his steps. His destination is not very certain, he wanders about, still looking for lodging. As long as he hasn't found one, he can keep on wandering. Passing along the church street, I heard singing at the back of a little café. I saw many people going in, especially women.
Masonic ceremony, women's voices, and birds 1:11:25 Crossing the shop, as they went in, I found myself in a large room, all decked out with flags and garlands, with Masonic emblems and the customary inscriptions. I remind you that this isn't about Freemasonry as it is today, this is about the period when it was linked to radical opposition to the established order, when it was often found in very working-class settings, whereas now it's often — I say often, not always — mafias in the liberal professions, to put it quickly.
1:11:57 I once belonged to the Merry Ones and the Shepherds of Syracuse. Nerval tried everything, didn't he? And someone who was a bit scandalized by the way he moved from an allusion to Islam, to Christianity, to Hinduism, said, "But what kind of person is this who has no religion," meaning he doesn't believe in God, that is, in the only thing that counts, churches, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman. Nerval replied with great humor: I have nothing, sir, you say I have no religion — I have at least twelve.
1:12:30 I once belonged — that's one of the twelve — to the Merry Ones and the Shepherds of Syracuse. That's vocabulary specific to Freemasonry. So I wasn't embarrassed to introduce myself. For now, he's a former Mason meeting old companions again. The bureau was majestically set up under a canopy adorned with tricolor drapery. You know there's always a ceremonial aspect to Masonic ceremonies, but here, clearly, it's a celebration. And Mozart sensed this solemn, initiatory side very well, through the great chords.
1:13:04 It's those three chords, that perfect chord each time, isn't it, that opens The Magic Flute in that scene, a text steeped in Masonic ritual. So, the bureau was majestically set up under a canopy adorned with tricolor drapery. Tricolor! You see, that's the left wing of the time. The kings have returned, and yet they have a tricolor flag — you tell me, and what do we do with the Republic then?
1:13:39 And the president gave me the cordial greeting due to a visitor. I recalled that at the Shepherds of Syracuse, they usually opened the session with this toast to the Poles and to the ladies. Today, the Poles are somewhat forgotten. Besides, I heard some very pretty songs at this gathering, but above all — here we go again — ravishing women's voices. They don't let go of the subject, they keep chasing it. And there, the conservatory had not dulled the brilliance.
1:14:09 Here, I ask you to pay attention, because I'm going to overlay a text found in another work. We'll find exactly the same characteristics by which he tries to pin down the nature of these very particular voices. The conservatory had not dulled the brilliance of their pure and natural intonations, of their trills, borrowed from the song of the nightingale or the blackbird.
1:14:42 So, once again, you see, women's singing, birds. I remind you that in the symbolic field in Freud, who doesn't at all share Nerval's fascination with the female voice, Freud is the first to say that, in the symbolic order, the chirping of birds is the mockery of young girls doing the laundry, washerwomen. So there's the triple presence of the bird, the female voice, and water, in the symbolic order. Of course, here we're stepping outside the ring.
1:15:14 I think of the Rhine maidens, who chirp away while frolicking in the waters of the Rhine. The conservatory had not dulled the brilliance of their pure and natural intonations, of their trills borrowed from the song of the nightingale or the blackbird. Solfège lessons had not falsified these fresh throats — it keeps coming back — and so rich in melody. So he's thinking more of the voices of women washing linen, at the washhouse or by the river.
1:15:48 Perhaps conscious memories of servants from childhood, because there were domestic servants everywhere, even among poor people at that time. How is it that these women sing so true? Nerval frequented the world of opera. Among Nerval's best friends in Paris was Berlioz, for whom he prepared the text of The Damnation of Faust. Berlioz no doubt wanted to make, along with The Trojans, the most successful of his operas, The Damnation of Faust. He made it on a libretto by Gérard de Nerval.
1:16:21 Starting from Gérard de Nerval's libretto — he frequented all the backstages of the opera, he knows what singers' voices are like. How is it that these women sing so true? And yet any professional musician could tell each of them, "You don't know how to sing." Nothing is as amusing as the songs young girls compose themselves, which generally allude to lovers' betrayals, as always, don't they?
Dialogued songs and the shepherd's melancholy 1:16:54 Or to the whims of the other sex. Sometimes there are touches of mockery — the birds mocking the frightened ones. Sometimes there are touches of mockery, remember, like the Rhine maidens facing Siegfried: I'm not going to give up the ring, you're being stingy with women. Sometimes there are touches of local mockery that escape foreign visitors. That should reassure you. I'm talking about the Rhine, I'm talking about Promenades et Souvenirs — we haven't changed subject, it's the same themes crowding in.
1:17:25 Often, in these improvised, popular songs, a young man and a young woman answer each other, like Daphnis and Chloe. In Corsica, this is still done. Even sometimes two men, in a café, one throws out a line and another answers — it's called paghjella. These are traditions going back to shepherd peoples. The shepherd is the one who is far away, who must sing or play his wind instrument — it doesn't matter whether it's a flute, an oboe, bagpipes — whether on the Breton moor, under Irish skies, or amid the splendors of Corsica.
1:18:09 But the shepherd is always sad, because he is far away, far from the community, far from the village, far from the one he loves, no doubt. The very first words of Tristan, a British story in the broadest sense, Great Britain and French Brittany alike, especially since what I'm about to quote is sung by a sailor on a ship going from Ireland to England, bringing the fair Isolde back to King Mark. Tristan has been given the mission by King Mark to bring him back the fair Isolde, whom the king wants to take as his wife.
1:18:43 The very first words, at the rise of the curtain of Tristan, as it happens, are the lookout's: "Westwärts schweift der Blick" — the wind blows westward, but the gaze turns eastward. Tell me, young girl of Ireland, are these your sighs that swell the sails? Yes, the solitary one, alone either because he is with his flocks — flocks don't graze in the center of the village, or even less of the city — or because he is a sailor lost in the ocean's immensity.
1:19:24 There's this melancholy of distance, of exile, somehow, and of course he thinks of the beloved. "These are your sighs that swelled the sails, child of Ireland." So you see, often a young man and a young woman answer each other, like — mythical couples — Daphnis and Chloe, who inspired Maurice Ravel's masterpiece, like Myrtille and Sylvie.
Garat's romance and Nerval's father 1:19:55 Dwelling on this thought, I found myself deeply moved, touched, as by a memory of youth. You see again, he's venerable. There's a certain age, a critical age, as they say for women, where memories come back so vividly that certain forgotten patterns reappear beneath the crumpled fabric of life. I'll skip ahead, I'll skip what follows, but I'll still link it to another song, sung by a man this time.
1:20:25 I told you earlier, it's rather rare — we're not old enough to stop dreaming of love, but no longer young enough to think always of pleasing. This sentence, I admit, is a bit Directoire in style. There's nothing more Nervalian than stepping back from what he's just written, that is, realizing that he's betraying himself, betraying an emotion he was taking care to hide from the reader. Nerval is the exact opposite of someone who throws his feelings in our face. He's someone who bears them himself and, with us, makes light of things, talks about the subjects everyone talks about.
1:21:04 But then, all of a sudden, when he went — remember, from Angélique — "it's the Day of the Dead that I'm writing to you, forgive these melancholy thoughts." I had told you, to the point of apologizing to the reader for feeling melancholic on the Day of the Dead — you'd think he was deeply affected, especially this born orphan that Nerval was. This sentence, I admit, is a bit Directoire. What brings it to my pen is that I heard an aging young man — a young man past his prime — who, having taken down a guitar from the wall, already the instrument of one who sings alone, performed admirably the old romance by Garat.
1:21:47 And there, luckily for us, it's a song that even now is a hit, since Nana Mouskouri, in the twentieth century, Nana Mouskouri herself, with her very beautiful voice and above all her incredible pitch accuracy, which is much rarer than people think — even if that's not the most important thing, but still. "Pleasure of love lasts only a moment, sorrow of love lasts a lifetime." Now look at Garat's portrait. With women, what characterized him was what one heard with the ear.
1:22:17 It's not the voice. Here he lingers on what is visual. He had his hair curled à l'incroyable — the incroyables, that's what the youth of the Directoire were called, the letting-go of the young people, letting go in the sense of relaxing, after the terrible years of revolutionary struggles and wars. He had his hair curled à l'incroyable, a white cravat — a cravat was an abundant jabot — a diamond pin on his jabot, and love-knot rings.
1:22:49 Rings with little mirrors. His hands were white and fine like those of a pretty woman. As he sings, he becomes feminized. Again, I'm sure no one planned this coincidence, but Lacan, in his commentary on Edgar Poe's "The Purloined Letter," shows that the minister — the terrible minister who blackmails the queen by keeping the letter that compromises her, threatening the very stability of the kingdom, which he could undermine, say, by publishing this letter in the press — a letter no doubt attesting to a queen's affair, an illegitimate liaison — from the moment he possesses this letter written to a woman, he becomes prey to the signifier, he becomes feminized.
1:23:38 And Edgar Poe, for Lacan — he's not speaking at random — shows that there's a mandolin lying about on his couch, he's become languid, he no longer goes out, he's like the housebound woman, no longer a wanderer. His hands were white and fine like those of a pretty woman, and had I been a woman, strange as it seems, I would have loved him despite his age, for his voice went to the heart. And suddenly we understand why.
1:24:08 This good man reminded me of my father who, still young, sang Italian airs with taste, on his return from Poland — his father was a doctor in the Grand Army. The man who wanders, wanders far, but so tragically that his wife, who had gone to join him — one must be in love to go looking for one's husband in the middle of the Russian campaign — caught fevers crossing a bridge laden with corpses, and is now buried somewhere in Poland, at Glogau.
1:24:39 No wonder Nerval's journeys always move eastward, and particularly toward Germany, without ever going all the way. And that he always went — I say this for those attentive to underlying structures, I told you it's quite different between mathematics and writing, in that writing, when it is beautiful, when it is poetic, is an exact science — all of Nerval's writing unfolds like the letter omega, you know, unfolding between two poles, like a horseshoe if you prefer, it's the same shape, between two poles, between two tombs.
1:25:21 The tomb of the mother, Mortefontaine — which ought to be at the fountain, the origin, the source, and which is in fact a corpse — between Mortefontaine, the name of the maternal village, his mother was a citizen of Mortefontaine, and three kilometers from Mortefontaine, the park of Ermenonville, with the tomb of Rousseau. From the mother's tomb to Rousseau's tomb, a madman shuttles back and forth between these two tombs, between the tomb of the wise man, the opposite of the madman, isn't he?
1:25:57 and the one he alludes to in that very beautiful line, "my brow is still red from the queen's kiss." There you risk losing your way, you have the two poles of all the journeys one can make. So, he had lost his wife over there in Poland, and could not help weeping as he accompanied himself on the guitar with the words of a romance she had loved, of which I've always remembered this passage. And there, in Italian: Mamma mia, medicate — heal, heal — questa piaga, se te plaît, per pietà, for pity's sake, Melicerto — that's a woman's name — fu l'arciero, it was the archer, the bow, that made my heart lose its peace, perché pace il cor non ha, isn't it?
1:26:43 There. You see, this polarity — I perceive, I say to the boys, it's possible I like woodlice, but next time I'd like them served to me on the side. Sir, to repair the castle, just the foundations would take 3 million. I don't know if I have that much on me, but it could be arranged, yes. It wasn't that tone at all. And there, periodically, and especially when there are voices, singing, suddenly he's stalked by the mal du siècle, but in a way no doubt even more threatening than for anyone else, at least within French Romanticism.
1:27:20 Unfortunately, the guitar is nowadays overtaken by the piano, the bourgeois instrument par excellence in drawing rooms, along with the harp. These are gallantries, graces of another time, the time when people sang live in public places. One had to go to Saint-Germain — so it truly was a journey through time — to find, in that still peaceful little world, the faded charms of the society of old. I waited for this auditory, vocal sequence, where we find again, you see, what formed the very substance of our first analytic reverie, Mignon.
Les Nuits d'octobre: the Halles and the ceremony at Pantin 1:27:58 You see we're in continuity here. To interrupt the reading of this wonderful text Promenades et Souvenirs, I'll move on to another text, from the same period. His decisive works, Nerval wrote in a very short span of years, between 1850 and his death in 1855. It took him a long time to write in the first person, to confide, really, a long time, a great deal of modesty.
1:28:28 But we're not here to write a thesis on Nerval. What interests me is the themes at work here, and how this goes beyond the case of good old Gérard, as they say. Philosophy dwells in the element of universality, the philosopher would say. It's insofar as this concerns us that I continue. Now, I'm going to move to another work, practically contemporary, which still has this in common with Promenades et Souvenirs, as well as with Les Filles du Feu — all three, take Sylvie for instance among Les Filles du Feu — the three begin in Paris.
1:29:02 Sylvie begins at the theater — first line: "I appeared every evening in the front boxes of a theater, dressed to the nines as a suitor" — you see the self-mockery, the romantic in love with an actress, quite banal. Promenades et Souvenirs, as we've just seen, is about how to find lodging in Paris, even if already on its outskirts. And Les Nuits d'Octobre, well, that begins with a plan within Paris.
1:29:33 He received an invitation from a friend to go east, to go to Creil, near Senlis, that is, on the banks of the Oise, and not, as one might think from the name, on the banks of the Marne — you'll see how important all these nuances are. His friend, clearly very much a country man, said to him, come, I have an otter hunt planned, I know you'll like it, come. And Nerval, then, is getting ready to accept this invitation, when he runs into an acquaintance in the street, who doesn't seem to be a very close friend, but anyway an acquaintance of someone, a chatterbox of the kind you find in big cities — I'll pass over this, and we recognize him ourselves, he's a double of Nerval himself, but I won't dwell on that for now, I did tell you this isn't a study on Nerval.
1:30:17 This friend is so talkative, and at the same time says things that aren't uninteresting, that Nerval forgets about the omnibus, and it's also too late for the train to Creil, so that he finds himself, as they say, caught by nightfall, with this friend in the streets of Paris — night has fallen, and in fact he's going to spend a sleepless night, that's the title, Les Nuits d'Octobre, an entirely white night. Where is he going to spend it? The only place in Paris that stays awake when all of Paris is sleeping at that time was Les Halles, right in the center, what was called at the time the hell of the living — all the meat consumed in Paris, all these carcasses were brought there, you see?
1:30:53 Charolais beef, good cuts, of course vegetables, fruit — I experienced, I'm from the generation that still knew what remained of Les Halles before they built Rungis and relieved a bit the congestion of central Paris, which is already not much fun to get around in, but when on top of that there was all the food for a few million Parisians arriving there with the carts, well — but you had to smell the scent of Cavaillon melons like that, in spring, in the slightly icy night, at the foot of Saint-Eustache. Let's not get sidetracked — no, actually we're right in the text, that's Les Nuits d'Octobre, and behold their somewhat fantastical wandering, at night, you see?
1:31:36 in cafés, strange places that have permission to stay open past two in the morning, where there are orchestras with blindfolded eyes, you see, so the musicians don't watch too closely what the couples are doing — and suddenly his footsteps and his friend's, for he's getting a bit tipsy, bring them all of a sudden to Pantin, you see? I'll skip a very delightful passage where he introduces us in every sense to Pantin. Pantin is dark Paris.
1:32:08 Pantruche, some say — let's not go that far. That's Nerval. And it turns out that arriving in Pantin — you see the identity of structure — he stumbles upon a Masonic ceremony. So don't trust it too much, it's not as realistic as it seems, it has the appearance of being realistic — a café, people, an omnibus — but in fact when the same structures reproduce themselves in completely different contexts, here it's Pantin, earlier it was Saint-Germain, it means there's an invariant somewhere.
1:32:42 Even the first names can change, the scene is exactly the same, that is, the two of them find themselves by chance thrown into a Masonic ritual, in a back, back room. So he stumbles upon it — the president of the republican banquet, as they said at the time, the president asked for indulgence for a young lady whose first attempt was about to take place before the friends gathered. So here's a very young girl who, for the first time, is going to sing in public.
1:33:14 having struck three times — you see the solemnity, suddenly, like the opening of a theater. We're in a back room among friends, among companions — having struck three times, he composed himself, and in the midst of complete silence, you see the man of theater that Nerval is. One heard a young voice, still marked by the roughness of early youth, exactly like at Saint-Germain, but which, gradually shedding — to use the expression of one of our neighbors, meaning connoisseurs — arrived at the boldest passages and flourishes.
1:33:55 The passages, that's the somewhat virtuosic runs, you see? The sopranos. The boldest passages and flourishes. And just as he spoke of the freshness of women's voices at Saint-Germain, which hadn't been spoiled by the conservatory, the same thing here. Classical training hadn't spoiled that freshness of intonation. The same words — freshness, that purity of tone. That moved, again the same metaphor, vibrant speech. Something that makes Nerval quiver every time, is the vibration of the voice.
1:34:29 That moved and vibrant speech which belongs only to talents still untouched — but not for long — by the lessons of the conservatory. And there, there, it begins, and we, we're going to finish. I've decided to divide, as I told you, our approach to Promenades et Souvenirs into two parts. The two parts synthesizing wandering, being nomad or sedentary.
1:35:00 But while in the first part we hesitate between nomad or sedentary, we will see in the second part, next time, that one can be both nomad and sedentary. And that, I can tell you now, isn't a detective story — it's better than that. As I told you regarding Mignon, in fact it's almost a detective story at every line, so it doesn't matter about the ending. In the final lines, he's going to take shelter from the rain — he's in Senlis, we've traveled kilometers of Promenades et Souvenirs — and to shelter from the rain, he quickly takes refuge in the caravan of some travelers passing through Senlis.
1:35:36 And necessarily the solution, the caravan, being at once at home, having one's house, and moving about, being at once no longer nomad or sedentary, but nomad and sedentary. There, that will be our second part, the 'and.' For now, I'm finishing the 'or.' You see that each time we end at the end of the quest. There, one would like to stop. It's not the four walls of a house, a dwelling, not yet, but it's the voice that should make the walls vibrate within which one hopes one day to settle.
"O young girl with the pearly voice": loss and the universal 1:36:13 And there begins a staggering, almost metaphysical development of what this voice suggests, heard at two in the morning in Pantin in the 1850s. 1850 — imagine where we are. O young girl with the pearled voice — and suddenly he no longer addresses the reader. You don't know how to phrase like at the conservatory. You don't know how to sing, as a music critic would say.
1:36:45 And yet, this young timbre, these trembling inflections. You see the vibration, the trembling. These trembling inflections in the manner of the naive songs of our forebears. Suddenly, this temporal depth that crosses ages and centuries fills me with a certain charm. You have composed words that don't rhyme and a melody that isn't square. The squareness.
1:37:16 Two verses, a refrain. It's magnificent. But that's squareness. You have composed a melody that isn't square. Perhaps a verse is missing. And it's only in this small familiar circle of friends that you're understood and warmly applauded — you're not triumphing at the grand opera. They're going to advise your mother to send you to a singing teacher.
1:37:46 She's a little girl, one shouldn't. She must be given singing lessons. And from then on, it's Nerval's obsession, loss, the loss of the beloved being. They're going to advise your mother to send you to a singing teacher. And from then on, here you are lost, lost to us. He no longer says 'to me.' I told you we were in the universal. Great authors, that's what it is. It's not those who tell us their story saying, 'You'll see, my story is more interesting than yours.' No, it's those who tell us our story by telling us theirs.
1:38:23 Nerval says, moreover, that we have memories, that each person's experience is the treasure of all. I say this because there's such an outburst against the universal in our era, where nothing is sworn by except identities, and you're assigned a residence, a color, a sex. Anyway, they're going to advise your mother, a kind of woman, to send you to a singing teacher, and from then on here you are lost, lost to us.
1:38:54 You sing at the edge of abysses. Good heavens, like the shepherdesses earlier, the shepherdesses, yes, the little shepherdesses of Montmartre. We thought there was a bit of humor there, there was comparative humor — the abysses of Montmartre as if we were in the precipices of Mont Blanc. But it's another metaphorical abyss. You sing at the edge of abysses like the swans of the Edda. And suddenly the swans are...
1:39:24 You know, they say — hence the expression 'it's his swan song,' meaning it's his last song before dying. Because she is lost to us, this girl is threatened. In any case, what's going to die is the girl who had that voice, if she's sent to the conservatory. It's that freshness — that's what's going to die. Isn't it? Now, the swan — a popular legend says that swans, which have a cry — it's neither a finch nor a nightingale — just before dying, it's said they emit sounds that draw tears from the eye of a god.
1:40:02 You sing at the edge of abysses like the swans of the Edda. What are the Eddas? Do you know a bit, some of you, the sagas? Sagen in German, means 'to say.' In Old Germanic, the saga is the saying, the legend, what is told. But the Eddas are even rarer. They are the oldest of the Scandinavian legends, those which were preserved, often for geographical reasons, on an island, in Iceland.
1:40:35 For islands are conservatories — researchers on polyphonies, on the origin, on the oriental modes of monodic Christian chant, go to Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia to conduct investigations. Because that's where certain modes, certain musical scales, were preserved due to isolation — isolat, insula, and isolat. Let's not complicate things, but it's important to know.
1:41:05 Now, the Eddas are the legends at the origin of the Ring of Siegfried. But yes, in the Eddas he's called Sigurd. You sing at the edge of abysses like the swans of the Edda. May I keep the memory of your voice, so pure and so ignorant. They will no longer hear you either in a lyric theater, later, or in a concert, or only in a café-concert. And it's not over. It takes on a dimension.
Farewell: Così fan tutte and Dante's seraph 1:41:35 Look, almost cosmic. Farewell. And forever farewell. Here, how can one not think of a vocal summit of all music written for voices? I'm thinking of Mozart's secret garden. The three great operas. The Da Ponte trilogy. In chronological order, The Marriage of Figaro, which is something of a small revolution in opera. Then, Don Giovanni, which won the title of masterpiece of masterpieces during a famous broadcast on France Musique in the 1960s.
1:42:12 And finally, the most mysterious, no doubt, Così fan tutte, the Mozart for connoisseurs. The word is interesting — one that isn't meant to exclude those supposedly not in the know, but on the contrary to tell them: pay close attention. It's Mozart for musicians. Così. So, now Così, very quickly: a fairly mature man is talking with two friends of his, two young officers of the king, in a café, and of course they're talking about women.
1:42:45 And the two young men are on the verge of proposing marriage to their beloveds. It's getting serious. And the other one teases them a bit, saying, you know, they're all a bit the same. Così fan tutte — they all do the same things. In French we'd say 'they're all the same.' Machismo, three guys, so two soldiers, in the Bay of Naples. The young men get angry — you're slandering our beloveds! So, calm down, and there — I'll go quickly — the mature man, Don Alfonso, says to them, come on, let's make a bet.
1:43:17 Before the end of the day, if you do exactly what I tell you, I tell you they will betray you. Even though they're in adoration, waiting for the marriage, they will betray you. So what does he tell them? You'll go — but you really do what I say — and they bet a hundred sequins, there's money at stake. You're going to disappear, pretending the king is calling you to war. They'll be unhappy, won't they? They'll cry. You'll come back, but disguised. All the Balkan peoples, they'll pass as Wallachians, in Turkey, well, anyway — and there, you'll court them.
1:43:55 I guarantee you that if you do exactly what I say, they will yield. And there, I should add that Mozart added — because at the time, the composer took care of the music, the text wasn't his, it was a former defrocked abbot, Da Ponte, who wrote the best librettos for Mozart — Mozart had an idea, he said, why don't you have each one court the other's beloved, to add a little spice. That's the pitch of Così. So why did I linger over this? Because it's three times, farewell — no, no, I'm not losing my thread.
1:44:25 My thread is in the ear. Farewell, farewell. Repeated in a haunting way, like an auditory fascination, in the famous quintet of farewells, when the two men come to announce to the girls that the king is calling them to war, with a boat waiting there to embark them, a boat of drunken peasants, to whom Don Alfonso — knowing he's going to recoup his money, win his bet — has given money to pass themselves off as soldiers, sons of soldiers.
1:45:00 Right? Suddenly there's the quintet of farewells. Why a quintet? Two women in tears, and three men — the mature man Don Alfonso and the two young men. We know it's comic, we know it's a joke, that they're not going off to war. Mozart makes the most heartrending farewell ever dared to be expressed musically. And you'll hear it three times, farewell, farewell — as if, pretending, when we know it's a joke, by pretending we were a thousand times more sincere, a thousand times closer to the real stakes than when we're lost in the anecdote of the here and now.
1:45:40 May I keep the memory of your voice, so pure and so ignorant, and never hear you again, either in a lyric theater, or in a concert, or only in a café-concert. Farewell, farewell, and forever farewell. You resemble Dante's golden seraph, who casts a final flash of poetry over the dark circles whose immense spiral keeps narrowing to end at that somber pit where Lucifer is chained until the day of the Last Judgment.
1:46:19 Here we are in the abysses of infernal theology, when simply we're witnessing a small gathering among friends where a shy little girl is forced to sing for the first time before an audience. Thank you for your attention. I'm sure that quite a few of you are beginning to realize that our analytical musings are much more homogeneous than one might think.
