English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Opening: the experience of each is the treasure of all 0:00 Everyone's experience is the treasure of all. He arrives at a formula which he holds the secret of, quite simple, transparent, that sheds light on one of the most difficult Hegelian concepts.
0:30 The concrete universal. Good grief! What I share with others, what is in me as an individual, but which I can share, and not what is in my bubble, what I cannot communicate precisely. There are people who spend hours and hours saying that the essential does not communicate. Well, be quiet then!
1:00 He makes us understand that if we communicate, it's because we have something in common. "Common" is written into "communicate." Ah, if the people who make a profession of communication remembered that from time to time — the dream of capital conceives of us all isolated, each on our own desert island like Robinsons, hitting each other.
1:39 I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower. How many times am I going to repeat that the only difference between poetry and mathematics is that poetry is an exact science — everyone's experience, the treasure of all. So we can begin.
The randomness of the wandering and the quest for lodging 2:11 Good evening everyone, good evening dear friends, good evening to all the comrades. You've increasingly realized that we seem to be wandering at random with Nerval. It's this theme of chance that I keep insisting on. I do remind you though that despite appearances, we're not doing literature. I'm not doing a series on the study of Gérard de Nerval, even if it may contribute to that, even if I stick very closely to the text at times, but it's the philosophical stakes here that concern us, isn't that right? Now, he does seem to be wandering a bit at random.
2:46 There's a vague "Nervuration," if I may coin the word, to his account, which consists in finding lodging, which is no small thing in life after all. You see the symbolic connotations — everything touching on housing and food, to name only these two fundamentals, isn't it? As they say, bed and board.
3:22 And so he acts as if he were wandering about a bit at random, and then we saw that if he's in Saint-Germain, it's not by chance, because we'll see this even more today — Saint-Germain is a pocket of memory for Nerval, a sort of reservoir of reminiscence. We left him on a long development centered around the theme of the voice, always the same, the feminine voice, which we had already seen in Mignon, the first analytic reverie, but also, more recently, in the answers to questions, the video centered on the theme of the voice, from the lost voice to the voice of salvation, roughly speaking, isn't it?
4:12 Playing on "voice" at times — the lost voice, VOIX — and the voice/way of the solution of salvation, VOIE — we saw that this apparent contingency, this chance where he seems to wander, to flit about a little at his fancy, and then we say, after all, why not, since he writes so well, and since he has humor, which is always pleasant — that's a bit the trap when it comes to Nerval, isn't it? You let yourself get carried along.
4:42 You see how the language is prophetic, how he's in the process of carrying us off, the fellow. You see? Carry off, take for a ride, take for a walk — these are terms that are often terribly ambivalent, aren't they? Which makes me think, in all mythology, of the always disquieting figure of the one who helps you cross over. You know? The ferryman, the boatman. One always wonders, doesn't one, whether one isn't going to drown halfway across. This notion of apparent chance — already, the fact that he's in Saint-Germain, we see that a whole host of memories are going to be relit.
5:20 Last time we saw how a song, for once not feminine but masculine, that of this young man who takes up a guitar, this young man in a second youth, already at an age of transition, a mature man in fact, who reminds him of his father, isn't that so? And today we'll see that he has many more memories, of cousins, of micro-regional kinships, right there in Saint-Germain.
5:54 But what makes us doubt even more the randomness of this wandering is not the logic that Nerval imposes on us without our knowing it — that is, he's hiding something from us and leading us to a very precise goal — no, without his own knowledge. He'd like to keep playing the journalist, the tour guide, because that's partly what it comes down to. Nerval's last works, Promenades et souvenirs, Les Filles du feu, Les Nuits d'octobre, from which I read an incredible excerpt, you remember, when he finds himself at that Masonic ceremony in Pantin, at two in the morning, in a dive, a dance hall at the back of which a ceremony of republican banquets is being held, solemn, with flags and hangings, a scene equivalent to Saint-Germain, isn't it, but which ends with that young man's song on the guitar.
6:51 And then afterward, long developments, exactly in Les Nuits d'octobre as in Promenades et souvenirs, on these voices, all these lines, these pages, so many of them, where he strives to characterize the vocal timbre, isn't that so, which makes chance collapse. Because as soon as this voice arises, Nerval's itinerary stops and turns away from what he was doing, from the search for lodging, for example — a serious matter. And there, because of a feminine voice heard at the back, in the back courtyard, at the back of a café, after crossing several rooms, it diverts him, doesn't it, from the diritta via, as Dante says in the Divine Comedy, the straight way, diritta via, ortho — orthonormal, ortho meaning straight, the opposite of sinuous, of curved.
7:45 I say sinuous and curved, because in another text, Nerval, to justify these wanderings a bit — because he makes detours with his legs, doesn't he, at least as much as he makes them in the plot and in the discourse — at a certain point he says: the spiral that Corporal Trim traces, in a tale, in an English story — a spiral is very sinuous — the path traced by Corporal Trim was no more sinuous than the course to which I invite you.
8:24 Well, and now, we left him at the very moment we reach the acme, the most intense moment, of this psychic fragility, which brings all the themes of melancholy — but in the clinical sense, not in the pleasant sense of sweetness, of romantic melancholy, of a beautiful autumn sunset, no, melancholy always tied to bereavements, isn't it, especially when he sees this young man who reminds him of his father, singing too, to the guitar, songs in which the father mourned the death of his wife — that is, Nerval's mother, whom he never saw again, since she left him — he was two years old, this century was two years old, Rome was replacing Sparta, already Napoleon was showing through Bonaparte, as Hugo would say before long, or rather at the same time as Nerval, moreover — they were both Jeune-France at the battle of Hernani — and so there's an undertone of mourning, you wouldn't think so, because the dominant tone is a journalistic one, roughly speaking,
9:34 it's not — even if — it's rare to see journalists with writing so dense and at the same time so transparent. I've summed all this up to say: we left him at the moment when he brings this parenthesis to a close, which comes close to an unbearable melancholy, when he quotes the poem by Metastasio, which the young man's song brings to mind, and which are the words of a refrain his father often sang, and whose refrain says something like: "Mamma mia, per pietà" — my mother, for pity's sake, tend to, whatever it is, that a young girl's name has done to me, isn't it?
10:22 And he says, "My father's eyes filled with tears when he sang them." There we left him, on a note where his lightness as a stroller — not a solitary walker, but a most sociable one — seems to have receded far away. Well, listen, perhaps it's time to get back to serious matters, so perhaps the quest for lodging — that's where we started, the search for housing — comes back to bring him down to reality, because after all he's in Saint-Germain, you know, there are little towns where by 9 p.m. it's hard to find a place that will take you in, they tell you it's a bit late, and imagine, back then, we're in what, the 1850s, right?
11:02 In Saint-Germain, he lingered — lingered because of the voices, the feminine voices, and the young man who was singing while accompanying himself on the guitar. We saw the incredible description of clothing. And so we find him again — I'll carry straight on, because Nerval's words matter more than mine — I'll carry on at the point where, you'll see, night has fallen, he takes a pleasure he doesn't hide from us in walking through the darkened streets of Saint-Germain, and he's going to insist on the timeless quality of these little towns surrounding Paris — it's a journey through time. But let's hear it instead.
11:47 But we still haven't found either lodging or a place to spend the night, the night of the day we arrived in Saint-Germain. Around midnight I went to knock at the door of a hotel where I used to stay often — that was understood, in the old days, at a time when everything was open, everything was simple. A few years ago it would have been impossible to wake anyone. Around midnight, oxen filed by silently.
12:17 It's the era, you know — especially these small towns are not separated from the countryside by endless suburbs and urbanized zones, let alone shopping centers. And oxen filed by silently, and their drovers could not tell me any way of spending the night. I imagine him asking a cowherd, isn't it, where can I spend the night — do we even speak the same language? Coming back to the market square, I asked the sentry, someone responsible for public order at night, if he knew of a hotel that could take in a rather belated Parisian.
12:56 "Come into the police post, they'll tell you there," he answered me. In the post, I met some young soldiers who told me, "It's really difficult, we go to bed here at 10 o'clock." These aren't Parisian hours. The evening is just beginning. "But warm yourself up a moment." Here I have to open a small parenthesis. We're going to talk about Kafka again. What's the connection! The uniform, the police, the judges, the gendarmes, the soldiers.
The theme of arrest, from Nerval to Kafka 13:26 You think I'm exaggerating? There's a theme that returns obsessively throughout all of Nerval's walking journeys: the theme of arrest. Oh yes, yes, yes — he gets arrested in Angélique, for those who've followed my series on Angélique. Don't forget, right? A passage where he expresses it in a humorous form, isn't it? In Angélique, it happens in Senlis, doesn't it? He was supposed to go toward Ermenonville and at the last moment decides to go toward Chantilly instead.
13:57 So it's exactly the reverse of the account we're following — he's going from east to west, not west to east, but never mind, let's not get confused for now, we won't get confused. We'll come back to this exact point, about the orientation of the walk. But they have a bowl of punch in a little establishment in Senlis called "The Inn of the Fleeing Trout." Nerval adds, "I beg you to believe that I'm inventing nothing." "You," meaning the reader, the editor of Le National, the newspaper to which he sent this text, Angélique, which I remind you appeared as a serial, and you can still find it in the newspapers of the time, in the archives.
14:39 "I beg you to believe that I'm inventing nothing." At the inn of what? Of what image? The fleeing trout, if you will? What did Rimbaud say? "What is there to understand of my word? It must flee and fly." And there, it's the Inn of the Fleeing Trout. So he says, "I beg you to believe, I invent nothing." But when you check — it's not in the critical apparatus, in the Pléiade edition for instance — when you check what the inn was actually called, no, it wasn't called the Fleeing Trout. He may swear to it and beg us to believe him, but it's the Inn of the Fleeing Trout.
15:10 You see? There must be pork roasts or cold cuts at this inn. Be that as it may, he sees gendarmes arrive who ask for their papers. I'm telling you one of countless arrest scenes. There are some in Les Nuits d'octobre. He even spends a night in a cell in Les Nuits d'octobre. And here he's about to spend a night at the police station. You see? That's why. It's invariant. Behind an apparently disjointed text, what doesn't move.
15:42 What, as we often say in psychoanalysis about the unconscious, insists on making itself heard, repeating itself if need be. As if we hadn't understood it the first time. Arrest. You see why I'm talking about Kafka? The Trial. All the more so since in Les Nuits d'octobre, in a dream he has in the cell, he dreams he's being judged in Paris at the great tribunal. He says, the kind of place where you always feel you're going to come out with your head cut off.
16:13 You see? No, this is serious. We speak of it lightly, but. And I'll finish the anecdote in Senlis before moving on to the one that takes place in Saint-Germain, so a bit further west. We're in the process of heading east. Let me remind you that Rousseau's tomb is in Ermenonville and that his mother's village was three kilometers before Ermenonville, at Mortefontaine. And afterward people say there's chance involved in this movement.
16:45 They answer him, "Well, gentlemen, you're under arrest." Nerval, who was traveling with a Breton friend, adds this remark: "My Breton friend was frowning, which made matters worse." The Breton, a bit like the Corsican, a bit hot-headed. "I told him, calm down, I traveled in the Orient, I've learned to speak with pashas, even with pashas. I already know how to talk to authorities. Monsieur le Commissaire, I said" — here I'm quoting the text word for word — "'I'm looking for places where the Abbé de Bucquoy once lived.'"
17:23 "I do have some relatives in the province after all." "Yes, but you have no papers." "That's true. Now, do you think criminals would go have a bowl of punch in a café full of gendarmes?" To which the soldier replies, "That might be a better way to disguise themselves." Nerval adds — you see, the humor continues — "I saw I was dealing with a man of wit. So I told him, listen, I'm doing what one would call scouting locations for the cinema, for a text I'm writing." The commissioner's face brightened.
17:53 "Ah, you're a writer! So am I, sir — I wrote a tragedy in my youth," and Nerval says one peril succeeded another. The commissioner invited them to his home to read them his tragedy. You see, it ends more or less happily. There's always this threat of arrest, right up to Les Nuits d'octobre, where, mind you, he does spend a night in a cell. He's only released because he has connections he made use of. Well, now let me pick up the rest of my text. He's just been told to find an open hotel.
18:24 "It's really difficult. We go to bed here at 10 o'clock, but warm yourself up a moment." Because we're at the start of autumn. Remember that well. At the decline of the year. At the twilight of the year. Wood was thrown into the stove. It starts to get chilly, especially at night. I start chatting about Africa and Asia. Try to picture the scene, won't you? A guardroom with soldiers camping there, literally — there are camp beds. And Nerval, to thank them, talks to them.
18:56 He's coming back from his journey to the Orient. When we say Africa, that means North Africa. Of Africa and of Asia. And Asia here means Lebanon — no need to look further afield — a little bit of Istanbul, of Turkey. "It interested them so much that people woke up those who had fallen asleep so they could listen to me." Imagine the scene: they wake up the others, the fellow soldiers. He'd gone to Africa! That was every soldier's dream of the time, to go to the colonies with pay that was more comfortable. This is the Corsican in me speaking — many Corsicans pulled themselves out of Corsican poverty, and out of vendettas, or both, when they had to flee far away by joining the colonial empire.
19:33 With a uniform, either as a customs officer or, most often, as a marine fusilier. And marsouins, as they're called — that's not the preferred term for marine infantry. So this makes the young soldiers stationed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye dream. "It interested them so much that people woke up those who had fallen asleep so they could listen to me. I found myself led to sing Arabic and Greek songs." But can you picture the scene with your own ears?
20:04 You've never — Nerval in 1850 — there wasn't the significant migration that has existed for some years now. And here's someone singing them Arabic melodies like the muezzin's call. It's extraordinary. In Arabic — Nerval is a champion of languages, as we'd say today. "I found myself led to sing Arabic and Greek songs, for the singing company we saw last time had put me in that frame of mind."
20:35 Around 2, 2 in the morning, one of the soldiers tells me, "You must have slept out under canvas before. If you like, take a spot on the camp bed." There we go, he's found a place to sleep. He was put up by the soldiers who are quartered in the château of Saint-Germain, in the guard post housed in the château, which is under renovation. "I slept very well until daybreak" — you see — "and thanking these fine soldiers as well as the sergeant, now quite mollified, I went off for a walk toward the hills of Mareil to admire the splendors of the rising sun."
Nerval's major journeys go eastward 21:09 So all melancholy seems to be chased away, the melancholy he had reached listening to the voices at the back of the café. Except that, look, as I was saying earlier — "my young years come back to me." There's less and less chance involved. "And the sight of the beloved places recalls in me the feeling of things past." And here, all of a sudden, a precision and a confession. Saint-Germain, Senlis and Dammartin — look on the map when you have time, look on Google Maps or wherever you like.
21:41 Saint-Germain, Senlis and Dammartin. The triad moves further and further east. We've noticed that all of Nerval's great journeys — these are the small ones, in the Île-de-France — but the journey to the Orient, the trips to Germany, to Austria, to Vienna, the loves of Vienna, etc., all go eastward, against the sun's course, against time, against what marks time. It matters that his mother is buried far to the east, over there, in cold Silesia, as he says.
22:14 The territory that is now in Poland and which was, at the time, part of the lands under the Reich's control, isn't it? "Saint-Germain, Senlis and Dammartin are the three towns which, not far from Paris, correspond to my dearest memories." There! Memory, whereas we thought it was the search for lodging that had brought him there. "The memory of old dead relatives" — once again the shadow of mourning looms over the text. The memory of old dead relatives remains for now rather vague and diffuse — it's not centered on one figure, it's not yet the dead man or dead woman — melancholically it attaches itself to what?
22:56 "Quite the opposite of the mourning of several young girls whose love made me a poet" — and of whom he has memories from adolescence — "or whose disdain sometimes made me ironic and pensive." Now we're sheltered, we finally have lodging. Right, so, "I slept very well" — let me pick up the text again — "until daybreak, and thanking these fine soldiers as well as the sergeant, now quite mollified, I went off for a walk toward the hills of Mareil to admire the splendors of the rising sun."
23:27 "I learned the style" — because it becomes lyrical, "the splendors of the rising sun," that's not the journalistic style — "in writing letters of tenderness or friendship. And when I reread those that have been preserved" — for a great traveler like him, it's hard to keep hold of all that — "I find in them strongly imprinted the mark of my readings of that time, especially of Diderot, of Rousseau, and of Senancour." Well, this is someone from the Romantic generation, those born in the 1810s, after 1812, 1813, whatever.
24:05 Wagner and Verdi were both born in 1813. So, the generations before that, meaning before the French Revolution, were people of the Age of Enlightenment — Diderot, Rousseau and Senancour, whom I often talk about in my other lectures, who is no doubt the one who best characterized what we'll call the mal du siècle, with a clinical lucidity sharper than that of any other writer, one who moreover has an admirable style, who is less well known, who produced a single unique work called Obermann, which you can find in the Folio edition, for example, and which I recommend to you — an epistolary novel, it's a marvel.
24:48 What I just said will explain the mood in which the following pages were written, and again, a typically Nervalian tic, it's probably to justify a change of tone. That means he feels he has betrayed himself. He had started off light, you know, like when they serve him beer with woodlice and little crustaceans at the bottom of it, and he says to the waiter, "Waiter, it's possible I like woodlice, but still, next time I'd like them served separately." We laugh.
To leave is to die a little: memory, journey and mourning 25:19 And then, you see, there are images of mourning or memory. Memory is always a form of mourning because it makes you think of times that are no more, like travel. We travel, walks and memories of good sense. We understand for the first time that this is connected. As you know, the language says it: to leave is to die a little. I had an Italian friend who told me it's the same in Italian. Partire è un po' morire.
25:49 To leave is to die a little. It's exactly the same. Death is the great journey. How do all the Flowers of Evil end? The book that most contributed to the mutation of nineteenth-century literature, written by a contemporary of Nerval, by Baudelaire of course, how do all these chapters end—Spleen and Ideal, Flowers of Evil, Parisian Scenes—they end with death, and at the end there's the death of lovers and death...
26:20 And then there's one at the end called The Voyage, which ends with "O Death, old captain, it is time, let's weigh anchor." This country, this country, is the world around us, reality, everything opposed to dreams, to reverie. This country bores us, "O Death, let's set sail, even if sky and sea are black as ink." Ah yes, that surprises you, especially in our ecological era—what could be more beautiful, I'll never say anything against the world around us, don't worry.
26:52 But still, "bitter knowledge, that which one draws from travel," as Baudelaire says, who knew a thing or two about it. "Even if sky and sea are black as ink, our hearts, which you know, remain filled with light"—the inner world. "Pour us your poison." That's the ending of all of Flowers of Evil, so I'll finish. "Pour us your poison so that it comforts us, from day to death." "We want, so much does this fire burn our brain, to plunge to the bottom of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what does it matter, to the depths of the unknown"—the word is underlined in italics—"to find something new."
27:31 Something new, underlined in italics, the last word of Flowers of Evil, something new. Hugo said to Baudelaire, "You have created a new shiver." I wanted to show this isomorphism, if you speak in a slightly more formal, more scholarly way. That means this analogy of structure, this isomorphism, between the journey through time, memory, and the journey through space, the walk on foot, sometimes by train, by omnibus, but most often on foot.
28:07 And so, which can only in the end be an occasion for mourning, especially when memories come back. But, as, Nerval has enormous modesty, he's not the type to make a show of things, he dreads people noticing that he changes tone. And above all, above all, he had already experienced internments, fits of madness. He holds a great grudge against two people, Jules Janin and his old companion Alexandre Dumas, who had been complicit, who acted as if Nerval were finished.
28:40 One of them said that there was no more news of him, he must have died on his travels. And as for Dumas, he had said, he's lost his mind, our dear Gérard. It's a shame, he was someone so kind, so likeable, it's terrible. When you recover your health, you build a literary career—he says it in a letter—I could not even get married anymore, I could not. He alludes to it, for the public this time, not in a letter but in the preface to Les Filles du feu, when he says to Dumas, since this preface is dedicated to Alexandre Dumas.
29:12 And it begins like this, this preface. "I dedicate this book to you, my dear master, just as I am going to dedicate Lorely to Jules Janin"—the one who had said he was dead. "A few years ago, I was believed dead. He had written my biography. A few weeks ago, I was believed mad. And you have"—listen carefully, because it's rare that a madman speaks with such control—"and you have devoted some of your most charming lines to the epitaph of my mind."
29:45 "Here indeed is glory that has fallen to me as an advance on inheritance"—that's a legal term, I'm getting a salary in advance, as an advance on inheritance. "I must beg the public to scale down so much praise. I am not dead." That's for his death. "Grant to my ashes"—now he'll speak of his madness—"or to the vague contents of this bottle which I went to fetch from the moon, in imitation of Astolfo"—a character, a hero from Ariosto's poems—"and which I have, I hope, put back in the usual seat of thought."
30:24 There, Nerval is suddenly aware that he has created a new genre, where the irrational, and madness—isn't that so?—are integral parts of the literature of the moment, it's not that they are expressed in an adequate way. That's the very beginning of the preface, I'll skip a few pages, and the ending is admirable, since he had followed Les Filles du feu with the sonnets, the Chimères, his most beautiful poems. Éluard said that in the Chimères one could find perhaps the most beautiful lines in the French language.
30:56 You see, Éluard, in the twentieth century, belongs to the Surrealist movement. And at the end he says this: "And since you were imprudent enough to quote"—implied, in your article—"one of his sonnets composed in a state of supernaturalist reverie, as the Germans say"—the word surrealist did not yet exist. "I find that one much more fitting. And since you were imprudent enough to quote one of his sonnets composed in a state of supernaturalist reverie, as the Germans say, supranatural, supernatural, you will find them all at the end of the volume."
31:36 But since he knows Dumas won't understand much of it, he adds, "You will see, they are hardly more obscure"—when one might think he's going to say, I don't know, than pastoral novels—"they are hardly more obscure than the metaphysics of Hegel." No one was talking about Hegel at that time. "Or the Memorabilia of Swedenborg"—a Swedish mystic—"and they would lose their charm"—he's talking about his poems—"and would lose their charm, their charm, by being explained, if that were possible. Grant me at least the merit of expression."
32:14 Enjoy the form, the musicality. "Grant me at least the merit of expression." "The only madness that will remain to me will probably be to believe myself a poet." "It's up to criticism to cure me of it." Full stop. I went all the way to the end to show you the incredible control. If ever a madman was wise, it is indeed in these lines. A wisdom of such distance and lucidity that his doctor, the admirable Dr. Blanche—at that time, you weren't mad going into an institution, you were sure to be by the time you left, with alternating boiling and freezing baths, electroshocks, it's appalling.
32:56 And it's this doctor to whom we owe texts for Aurélia, since he had said to Nerval, "If you can put"—he had seen he was dealing with someone one could talk to—"if you can put your visions into writing, it might relieve you." There are texts we owe, thanks to that advice. Well, so, you see, Nerval dreads this reputation that apparently well-meaning friends—"My God, protect me from my friends, my enemies I'll take care of myself, right?"
33:27 are in the process of giving him. "Who will pay attention to the words of a madman, a lunatic?" It's like a psychic death, a social death. So he has this obsession, every time, you see, that the tone changes, especially since this is written in the 1850s, Les Filles du feu, Promenades et souvenirs. That is to say, I already mentioned it in my talk on Angélique, which I refer you to in our videos, Nerval's Angélique, but the 1850s are the moment when literature is beginning to abandon Romanticism.
34:04 So, in the time of Lamartine or the young Hugo, being melancholic was in the spirit of the age. Now, it's replaced by realism, in order to make masterpieces—Balzac for one. Realism is not reductive. Balzac is not a camera plus a tape recorder plus a video camera. I mean, he doesn't just have eyesight, he's a visionary. But we're not here to talk about Balzac, whom Nerval liked very much, by the way. He said he died honored, as his first name suggests, in a letter to his father.
34:36 And realism, the Parnassians, in poetry, who reacted against Romanticism by writing craftsman-like verse, of which it has often been said, despite its admirable formal quality, that it was a bit cold, marmorean, cold as marble, marmor, you see. So these sorts of returns into the past, toward the Romantic generation, are moreover out of step with the times. And that is why I will quote you shortly a text that begins with "It is the day of the dead, autumn."
35:09 That's why I made a point of it earlier. It's for November, isn't it? "It is the day of the dead that I write to you. Forgive these melancholic ideas." How can one feel the need to apologize for being a little melancholic on the day of the dead? There, I wanted to comment on that at some length. This need to explain oneself, isn't it? He begins by saying, "I am now resuming and continuing. I learned style"—so he's talking about his writing—"by writing letters of tenderness or friendship."
35:43 "And when I reread those that have been kept, I find strongly imprinted in them the mark of my readings at the time, especially of Diderot, of Rousseau"—that is, the era of the awakening of sensibility in the Age of Enlightenment—"and of Senancour," in increasing order, isn't it, of increasing Romanticism. "What I have just said will explain the feeling in which the following pages were written." We haven't read them yet, but this suggests that something is about to happen, that it's going to become much more subjective, less journalistic, he's even going to talk about what's around him rather than himself.
36:14 "I had taken again to loving Saint-Germain during those last beautiful autumn days. I settled at the Ange-Gardien"—the hotel—"and in the intervals of my walks, I jotted down some memories." We have to get to the middle of his short account to justify the title "Promenades et souvenirs." "I jotted down some memories which I dare not call 'Memoirs'"—and why, you'll see, sometimes he moves very fast and sometimes he lingers over a detail—"and which would rather be conceived along the lines of Jean-Jacques's Solitary Walks, for heaven's sake."
36:49 And we don't yet know that we're heading straight for Ermenonville, where Rousseau's tomb is. "I will finish these memoirs, I will finish them in the very country where I was raised." Now he begins to tell everything, and where he died. And there begins—for the first time, all of Nerval's biographers have noted that he took a long time to talk about himself, with a great deal of modesty about what is personal, I mean.
37:19 And it begins like this, a title, Juvenilia. "Chance has played such a great role in my life"—again we're made to believe that all this happens by chance—"that I am not surprised, thinking of the singular way in which it presided over my birth." Excuse me, I'll bounce off the notion of chance, we're doing philosophy here. Two references. Nothing to do with one another. Just as there, there are all sorts of different people who don't like it when I speak ill of Heidegger, or those who like it when I...
Chance according to Leibniz and Freud 37:49 that I recall, isn't it, not his past, but his ignoble future after the war, isn't it—I persist and I sign. I will quote Leibniz and Freud, one of the most profound of the idealist metaphysicians, isn't it, and profoundly religious in his philosophy, without that contradicting rationality, of course—he is one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
38:19 And Freud, on the subject of chance—I'm not losing my thread—Leibniz said, "With my pen, I make dots"—these are real quill pens—"I make dots on the page like that, daydreaming." Well, I'll bet you, said Leibniz—he doesn't say it quite like that—he says, "I am certain there must be equations that would allow one to trace a curve passing back through all these points in the order in which I made them," apparently just like that, daydreaming at random.
38:52 Order, where there seems to be none; necessity, where we speak of chance—chance and necessity, for heaven's sake. What's at stake here, one might say it's a trick, isn't it—necessity making itself pass for chance in order better to show how much it catches up with us. And as for Freud, he says: ask someone to pick a number at random and watch closely and analyze that number. You'll be in for surprises. We think we're picking it at random like that.
39:23 All right. I'll continue. "Chance has played such a great role in my life that I am not surprised, thinking of the singular way in which it presided over my birth." So here we are, really going back to origins. One might say, that's everyone's story. But not everyone has the chance to tell their own story. Look at the precautions he takes before speaking about himself, how he justifies speaking about himself. "And if everyone did so, there would be no great harm." And then this beautiful phrase: "the experience of each is the treasure of all."
The experience of each is the treasure of all: the concrete universal 39:57 Oh no, if it were only to speak of what is intimate and personal to me and happened only to me, it would be idle talk. Well, he's not a philosopher, but still! He makes us understand that if we communicate, it's because we have something in common. Common is written into communicate. Ah, if the people who make a profession of communication remembered that from time to time, communication would live up to the promise contained in that word. Isn't that so?
40:28 There is the French language between you and me which is common, for now. Otherwise we couldn't even communicate if there were nothing in common. If each of us were in a bubble—and I'm being polite now, let's say each in whatever you imagine, isn't it. Capital's dream is that we each be isolated on our own desert islands like Robinson Crusoes, isn't it, at each other's throats. That's a bit what I'm hearing more and more in the surrounding civil society. Especially since the disappearance of Marxism, of progressive theories.
40:58 And there's even a hit to social progress, since right now we're rather in the process of destroying social gains rather than continuing to advance them. To the point of calling them privileges. The privilege of privileges was birth. The Revolution was made against privileges of birth. Social gains are not privileges of birth. They were hard won. There were deaths. What an ignominy! So I'm lingering a bit here because he says the experience of each is the treasure of all.
41:30 He arrives, in a formula whose secret is entirely his own, so simple, so transparent, at stating one of the most difficult Hegelian concepts: the concrete universal. I'm continuing to do philosophy, that's what we're here for. Now, in the traditional logic since Aristotle, we have the concrete particular, isn't it—not the piano in general. One doesn't play on a piano in general but on a particular piano, tuned a certain way, with such and such a sound and dimensions, etc. I don't shake the hand of man in general, but of a particular, individual, unique man.
42:03 I don't shake hands with Man with a capital M. So there's the particular, which is concrete, and the universal. The notion of man is more abstract than that of Frenchman. That of Frenchman is more abstract than that of Breton or Alsatian or Corsican, and that of Breton or Corsican is more concrete than that of a native of Bastia, and so on. After Bastia-man, Bastia-woman, man and Breton, woman, we could go on. The more determinations there are, the closer we get to the individual. Forgive me for this little technical aside, which I make sound as if I'm improvising.
42:34 You can well imagine this isn't improvised. I used to teach it often in the final year of secondary school because it's fundamental, and it's what gave Aristotle's formula an unfathomable depth beneath its apparent simplicity. There is knowledge only of the universal, and existence only of the individual. There is knowledge only of the general. What is my cat, from a zoological point of view? My cat belongs to the species cat, to the family of felines, in the genus of mammals.
43:07 Yes, I classify it under increasingly general categories. To know is to classify within something that goes beyond this particular case which is my cat, who, at the individual level, there's not even anything left to name him by. He's not just a cat, mine is called Bintou. It's quite affectionate, it's because it's an African name and he's a cat that's black from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail. So it's not very politically correct, I don't know, but the first ones to laugh about it are my African friends. It's a name originally from Guinea, especially.
43:37 So a proper name is needed. You were taught that in grammar, in primary school. What's opposed to a proper noun is a common noun. You see, there is knowledge only of the general and existence only of the individual. Take these two sentences and say the same thing but in reverse. That's what we get: the individual is unknowable and the general does not exist.
44:07 Only the individual exists, and only the general is knowable. So the general does not exist because it's the opposite of the individual. Man in general does not exist. Neither does the piano in general. It's this piano that exists, isn't it? I'm not very... and when it's an individual, it exists, it does exist, but there's too much determination, too concrete.
44:38 Yes, as I told you, man, European, French, Alsatian, male, female, Alsatian from Strasbourg and not from Colmar—in the end, when you get to the individual, there's an infinity of attributes, and they keep changing all the time. No, I won't apologize the way Nerval does for this abstract parenthesis, because it's important. The experience of each is the treasure of all. A synthesis of the particular and the universal.
45:09 A scandal of Hegel's is to speak not, on one side, as had been said before him, of the general, the abstract universal that doesn't exist—things important for understanding but that don't exist—and of the individual concrete, the concrete particular, but to speak of the concrete universal. For heaven's sake! What I share with others. What is in me as an individual but which I can share, and not what is in my bubble, what I cannot communicate precisely.
45:45 There are people who spend hours and hours saying that the essential does not communicate. "Be quiet!" It's like the skeptics who say that truth can never be reached by language, etc.—that's what our thinking tells us. So then why not do as Cratylus did, one of the rare consistent skeptics? I respect him because he pointed at things with his finger, he shut up about it. It's Aristotle who reports this. So, "and if everyone did this," tell their own story, "there would be no great harm, the experience of each, the treasure of all." So we can begin.
The escaped horse of 1770 46:16 It begins like a tale. One day, a horse escaped from a green meadow bordering the Aisne. Remember, the river and its bank. You'll see why, you won't regret it. What charm drew it toward these dreaded banks? One day, a horse escaped from a green meadow bordering the Aisne and soon disappeared among the thickets. It reached the dark region, the horse, of the trees, and lost itself in the forest of Compiègne.
46:47 I say this for the sake of the topology, for those who aren't familiar with these places: Compiègne is the largest forest in the Île-de-France north of Paris, and Fontainebleau the largest to the south. They're symmetrical forests, actually. Compiègne is about 80 km north of Paris, Ermenonville halfway. So, to come back to the country we're heading toward, Senlis, from Mortefontaine to Ermenonville, you have to go down a bit to the south.
47:18 There we go. He reached the dark region of the trees and lost himself in the forest of Compiègne. This was around 1770. The year Beethoven was born, the year Hölderlin was born, and the year Hegel was born. There are vintage years like that, all the same. Napoleon—whatever one thinks of him—but I mean, you can't say he had little importance in the becoming of that era and even of what followed right up to today—see the Civil Code and people go by, and the grandes écoles, and the Banque de France.
47:50 Napoleon was born in '69. All that belongs to the generation—otherwise I won't stop—of those who were 20 at the storming of the Bastille. This was happening around 1770. Under the ancien régime, an old regime heavy with changes soon to come. "It is not a rare accident," Gérard goes on, "for a horse to escape through a forest. And yet I have hardly any other title to existence. This is probable, at least, if one believes what Hoffmann called the chain of things."
48:22 Once again, a little indirect reflection on chance. Those, they're multiplied. The grandfather was daydreaming by the riverbank, by the Oise, and the horse took the opportunity to make a run for the fields and even the woods. My grandfather was young then. He had taken the horse from his father's stable. At the time, it was as if you took the car and crumpled the bodywork. Or made it fly off. Worse, you tell your father, "I no longer have your car." My grandfather was young then. He had taken the horse from his father's stable.
The water's edge, the hostile father, Mortefontaine 48:54 Then he had sat down by the riverbank, dreaming of I don't know what. But before looking for ancestors for himself, this is already a tradition of the dreamer by the water. Remember that it's by the water. Like Rousseau's Fifth Walk: "the flux and reflux of that water, its noise, continuous but swelling at intervals, striking my ear and my eyes without let-up, made up for the internal movement which reverie was extinguishing in me, and sufficed to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think."
49:30 We'll talk about water again the way we talked about the daughters of the Rhine when we were studying the Rhine. "Dreaming of I don't know what while the sun was setting amid the crimson clouds of the Valois and the Beauvaisis, the water was turning green and shimmering"—water is insipid, you take a glass of clear water, no taste, no color, no smell. No, no, this is water à la Gauguin or Van Gogh. Lots of colors in those waters. The water was turning green and shimmering with dark reflections.
50:01 "Purple bands streaked the reddish glow of the sunset. My grandfather, turning around to leave, no longer found the horse he had brought. In vain he looked for it, called for it until nightfall. He had to go back to the farm. He was of a silent nature. He avoided encounters, went up to his room, and fell asleep." I'll go fairly fast since this part is clear. "He fell asleep, counting on providence and on the animal's instinct, which might well lead it back home."
50:31 "That is not what happened. The next morning, my grandfather, having come down from his room, met in the yard his father, who was pacing with big strides. He had already noticed that a horse was missing from the stable. Silent like his son and in a bad spot, he had not asked who was guilty. He recognized him the moment he saw him standing there. I don't know what happened next. Memory grows hazy. A too-harsh reproach was doubtless the cause of the resolution my grandfather took."
51:04 It has been noted that the figure of the father is always fairly hostile and unfavorable toward the main characters in Nerval's texts. We'll see this more when we talk about the songs about the father who locks his daughter in the tower because she won't give up her love. "I'd rather be locked in the tower, father, than give up love." "A too-harsh reproach was doubtless the cause of the resolution my grandfather took."
51:35 "He went up to his room, made a bundle of a few clothes, and through the forest of Compiègne"—we're going south—"he made his way to a small country situated between Ermenonville and Senlis." That is, between Rousseau's tomb and Senlis, there is the maternal village, which he doesn't name—the sinister name of Mortefontaine. I remind you what "la Fontaine" connotes—the opposite of the deathly, of death. The fountain is what quenches, what "laben"
52:06 as they say in German, "leben"—"live." It's what saves from drought, from the death of the self, from physical and moral withering. Isn't it? The miracle of water has been accomplished. And here we are talking about Mortefontaine—"dead fountain." Death lies at the source. Good grief! The fountain run dry! What's the use of going back to the source if it's only to learn this news? We saw this when we spoke about amnesia, about anamnesis.
The negative subject and the beneficial maternal uncle 52:39 Why pursue anamnesis, go far back into our past? As one might do either when building one's genealogy—very fashionable now with computers—or when undergoing an analysis—what's the use of going back into the past if it's only to suddenly stumble upon the most fearsome truths? I say this because I no longer remember which of you it was—a lady, a young woman, I don't know, but I do know her first name—who said, "I have trouble grasping this notion of the negative subject."
53:12 There you have an example. The same subject wants both to remember and, at the same time, there's a force within him that won't let him go too far back in memory. You see? There's an example for you. The contradiction inside the subject itself. Not the contradiction between France and England, the Hundred Years' War, not between left and right, high and low, but the contradiction within identity itself. Pushing, within the same. So: "He made a bundle of a few clothes; through the forest of Compiègne he made his way to a small country situated between Ermenonville and Senlis," near the ponds and the rivers that flow—time that passes—and then there are the ponds.
53:50 The dead water, the ponds of Châalis, an old Carolingian residence. "There lived one of his uncles, who was said to descend from a seventeenth-century Flemish painter." Well, sometimes he says seventeenth, sometimes eighteenth, depending on the work. This maternal uncle played a very important role, but I'm not going to talk about everything at once. "He lived, the uncle, in an old hunting lodge"—so, a maternal uncle who played a very great role in Nerval's dreams, a beneficial role, I'll say that much, all the same.
54:20 In anthropology—far removed from Nerval, that is, when studying either the Amazonian Indians, or the Pygmies, or the Melanesians of Oceania—one notices that the maternal uncle always has a privileged role in kinship relations. He's the one who's generally always beneficial—the mother's brother. "There lived one of his uncles, who was said to descend from an eighteenth-century Flemish painter. He lived in an old hunting lodge, now in ruins, which had once been part of the appanages of Marguerite de Valois."
54:53 As if in his memories one suddenly finds almost aristocratic roots—but you see, in any case, the place is. It's not just the abbey of Châalis, the old Carolingian residence, the appanages of Marguerite de Valois. "The neighboring field, surrounded by thickets"—which are called "bosquets," little woods, thickets—"was situated on the site of an ancient Roman camp"—we're going further and further back—"and has kept the name of the Tenth of the Caesars." Good grief, who is the Tenth of the Caesars?
55:25 The tenth emperor? Good grief! But yes, those of you who are historians have already guessed it: it's Nerva. Gérard de Nerval. That's not his real name, you know—on his birth certificate it's Gérard Labrunie. His name, that much is certain, he didn't choose at random. It's overdetermined—don't make me say I've found the secret of the name Nerval. Why Nerval? It's one of the determinations in Nerval. If there's one drawer, fifty more follow.
55:55 It also means Nerval, the black valley—"nero" is black in Italian, isn't it? "I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled"—widower of his mother. At age two, she leaves. So, practically from birth, he never knew her. I'm telling you this, allow me these asides. Because you'll say, look, you're interpreting even though you say you don't like interpretation. No—it's because we finally have, for the first time, a text where he's going to speak of his mother. Very discreetly. We're not there yet. I repeat: "the neighboring field, surrounded by thickets," next to the maternal house, "which are called the Bosquets, was situated on the site of an ancient Roman camp and has kept the name of the Tenth of the Caesars."
56:33 Nerval doesn't name it. I don't know. But his modesty suffers from it. And also how he hides from the reader everything personal that he can. "Rye is harvested there"—still poor, not wheat. "Rye is harvested there in the parts not covered with granite and heather. Sometimes, while plowing, Etruscan pots have been found there"—and the Etruscans come before the Romans. You see, it becomes a bit fantastical, going back in time. "Medals" in the northern mists of the Valois, with the ponds.
57:06 We're very far from these Mediterranean civilizations. But it's true they came all the way up there. There was an amber trade with the British Isles. In any case, in the symbolic order, there's a fantastical coloring. "Sometimes, while plowing, Etruscan pots have been found there, medals, rusted swords, shapeless images of Celtic gods," even older. "My grandfather helped the old man cultivate this field"—it sounds almost like a biblical scene, you see, like Abraham, like Moses received by Jethro in the tent, you see, in the desert.
57:42 He helps tend the flocks and is rewarded patriarchally, you see, by marrying his cousin. So this concerns his grandfather—his mother's father. "I don't know exactly the date of their marriage, but as he married with..." as also my mother received the name Marie-Antoinette, along with that of Laurence, it's likely they were married a little before the Revolution.
The mother dead in Silesia, abandonment and melancholia 58:16 Marie-Antoinette. "Today my grandfather rests with his wife and his youngest daughter"—the younger sister of Nerval's mother; I'll slow down—it's rare for Nerval to give such crucial details. "Today my grandfather rests with his wife and his youngest daughter in the middle of the field he once tilled. His eldest daughter"—he doesn't even say "my mother"—"his eldest daughter is buried far from there, in cold Silesia."
58:46 Silesia, as they say in German—I tell you, it belonged to Poland, then to Germany until 1945. The Soviets—it's the richest part of the region, there are powerful coal mines, it's the Ruhr of the East, if you will. They gave it to Poland and in exchange took from Poland—there's a small westward shift of Poland—they took the eastern part of Masuria, the region of lakes and forests. So, "his eldest daughter is buried far from there, in cold Silesia, in the Polish Catholic cemetery of Gross Glogau."
59:23 "She died at 25 from the fatigues of war, of a fever she caught crossing a bridge laden with corpses." She must have been in love to go fleeing into Russia, to rejoin her husband, leaving a two-year-old child with the wet nurses. You know he was well looked after, but still, it's more than just a bereavement, it's an abandonment. As felt from the child's side—I'm not permitting myself to judge the mother, I admire her, on the contrary, almost the mother, isn't it?
59:53 It's a fine figure. "She died at 25 from the fatigues of war, of a fever she caught crossing a bridge laden with corpses." One thinks of the Berezina. Nerval's father was a doctor, a military man in the Grande Armée, where his carriage nearly overturned. You see how it becomes dramatic. "My father, forced to rejoin the army at Moscow, later lost her letters," all the traces, everything that, for memory, forms pockets that allow one to do anamnesis—lost in the waters.
1:00:24 "Later lost her letters and her jewels in the waters of the Berezina." And there, it begins. "I never saw my mother. Her portraits were lost or stolen. I only know that they resembled an engraving of the time, after Prud'hon or Fragonard." You have a painting, a very beautiful painting. They're somewhat pompier painters, but Prud'hon is a painter with a great deal of grace in his very classical style.
1:00:56 You have at the Louvre a very beautiful painting of... Eros and Psyche. The scene where Psyche—at night she wakes and lights a little oil lamp to finally see what she's forbidden by her lover to see, what he looks like. She's reassured, she sees the god of love. Not bad, after all. The silly girl, she should have obeyed, because she trembles with such emotion at seeing so beautiful a young man in her bed that she lets a drop of boiling oil fall, of course, onto the god's skin, who wakes up, and everything vanishes.
1:01:29 "The fever that killed my mother seized me three times." There, suddenly, his madness—because that's where his illness begins. "Seized me three times"—there were three internments, at periods that form singular, periodic divisions in my life. Today one would say, if one absolutely had to take a clinical approach, that Nerval suffered from bipolarity, hence the alternation his doctor saw very clearly. His doctor was kind enough to write, after the suicide—because suicides weren't buried [normally].
1:02:00 They weren't entitled to the sacraments. They were buried, but without the sacrament. He wrote to the Archbishop of Paris to say, "I guarantee you that Monsieur de Nerval looked his madness in the face." So there you have it—bipolarity, alternation between delirium and, on the contrary, extraordinary mastery. "The fever that killed my mother seized me three times"—periods that form singular, periodic divisions in my life. "Always at those times I have felt my mind struck by images of mourning and desolation."
1:02:35 The fools who think Freud is a charlatan—Freud, who doesn't know Nerval at all, so they didn't coordinate, and he didn't need to, because he saw thousands of them on his couch—people bring up the same connections between what? Between mourning and melancholy. Melancholy in the clinical sense, not romantic melancholy. The severe kind, the one that's practically impossible to cure. It's a depression you never come out of, if you please. Black humor, melas, melancholy. "I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine at his ruined tower."
1:03:08 The father is the one who castrates. His father was from Agen. Don't think there's chance involved. How many times must I repeat that the only difference between poetry and mathematics is that poetry is an exact science? That's why it is less creative. It's a tribute mathematics pays, having managed to turn around difficulties. So, it's interesting to see that mourning and melancholy form a pair.
1:03:44 I recommend it—it's actually called "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud's essay. "Always at those times I have felt my mind struck by images of mourning and desolation that surrounded my cradle." So he senses that there's a proto-history of his own psyche. There was a drama in the family, in the house—not at the moment when he was babbling his very first words. "The letters my mother wrote."
1:04:15 Well, well, the feminine voice. Good grief! There we go, the cousins, the aunts—"your mommy just wrote to you." She would read it into the little one's ear. "She hopes you're behaving," I imagine. "The letters my mother wrote from the shores of the Baltic"—excellent!—"or from the banks of the Spree," the river that flows through Berlin, "or of the Danube." That means to hold back the water, in general, the Baltic, the rivers, and the banks.
1:04:46 "The letters my mother wrote from the shores of the Baltic, or from the banks..." did not want us to know that she had died catching a fever brought on while crossing a bridge laden with corpses, and that her jewels had been lost in the waters when one goes beyond the bank—the bank is always perilous—of the Berezina. "These letters had been read to me so many times." The feminine voice. "The sense of the marvelous, the taste for distant travels, the shores of the Baltic or the Spree, were doubtless for me the result of these singular impressions."
1:05:23 A kind of sketch of self-analysis quite striking for the era. "As well as of the long stay I made in an isolated countryside, in the middle of the woods, often entrusted to the care of servants and peasants." At that age, it's to women that children are entrusted—not surprising, especially at that time. "Often entrusted to the care of servants and peasants, I had nourished my mind with strange beliefs, legends, and old songs." Nerval's fascination with folk song. Like Mignon, isn't it? "There was enough there to make a poet, and I am only a dreamer in prose."
"I am only a dreamer in prose" 1:05:58 Admirable text. There you have it, this kind of childhood, both mournful and, in some way, happy. You see? We're not at some court in Paris, and all that has its season. "I was seven years old, and I was playing carefree at my uncle's door." Still at Mortefontaine in the Valois. But everything comes to an end. The Napoleonic wars come to an end when "three officers appeared before the house. The tarnished gold of their uniforms barely shone through their soldier's greatcoats."
1:06:30 The first one—well, the father—"kissed me with such effusion." One can imagine he hadn't seen his boy since he was born, since he left France for Moscow. "The first one kissed me with such effusion that I cried out"—the first words to his father—"'Father, you're hurting me.'" What a bunch of fools, those who think Freud, all that, is the ravings of some guy who was interested in that stuff and who, on top of it, read [Greek?] and had mistresses.
1:07:01 Honestly, go believe a guy like that. What an era. "From that day on, my destiny changed." I'll continue—so much for childhood. "I was always surrounded by young girls"—mourning now gives way, on the contrary, to the awakening of eros. How it all overlaps. "One of them was my aunt. Two women of the house, Jeannette and Fanchette"—you see, such rural names—"lavished their care on me too."
1:07:34 Of course, a small child is entrusted to cousins, aunts, and so on. I'm skipping a passage where he decides to leave Saint-Germain to continue, as he said, toward Chantilly, then Senlis, then Dammartin. He named neither Mortefontaine, the cursed village, from where the fountain has come, which recalls the tomb, which recalls a dead mother—sorry—nor Ermenonville, where Rousseau's tomb is.
1:08:11 You see? This time, I bless the railway for saving time, because he'd spent a lot of time in Saint-Germain. "An hour at most separates me from Saint-Leu"—here begins the magic of place names—"the course of the Oise, so calm and so green, cutting out in the moonlight its islets of poplars, the horizon scalloped"—and scallops are on the edges of dresses or fabrics or tablecloths—"the horizon scalloped with hills and forests, the villages with familiar names called out at each station, the accent already noticeable of the peasants boarding from one stop to the next, the young girls wearing madras headscarves, according to the custom of that province."
1:08:56 You get the impression that he's making a journey 5000 kilometers from the temperate zone, whereas he's talking about places that are 20 kilometers from Paris, from Notre-Dame. The young girls with their madras headscarves, according to the custom of that province, all of this moves me and charms me. It seems to me that I breathe a different air, and setting foot on the ground, I feel an emotion even more vivid than the one that stirred me not long ago when crossing the Rhine again — good Lord, the Rhine, the border you have to cross to go toward the mother's tomb, but he doesn't tell us that, the Rhine.
1:09:36 But I'm telling you, the fragment of a letter he writes during his last journey, a year before his death, practically at the time he writes this — but here, he's back in Paris, but when he sets off on a journey, his friends, after a crisis, a last fit of madness, that was his rhythm, it's not — after the madness, there's the journey, the inspiration coming back and the writing that does him good. This has been studied. And there he writes to Georges Bell or to Jules Janin, well, one of those two friends, I'll check, he writes something prodigious.
1:10:12 Last evening, touching the banks of the Rhine, I found my voice, my eyes, and my means again. On the train from Strasbourg to Baden, I composed a sonnet. And I felt myself ablaze as under the finest sun of my finest days. Extraordinary. You see the magic of travel that sets this off. So there, he says, I feel — even though it's much closer, over time — the passion for great journeys, it's a…
1:10:42 It seems to me that I breathe a different air, and setting foot on the ground, I feel an emotion even more vivid than the one that stirred me not long ago when crossing the Rhine again. The fatherland — even though it's the motherland. The fatherland is twice over the homeland. I love Paris very much. He was born in Paris, on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, which at that time was called Rue Saint-Martin. The oldest axis of Paris, isn't it — the one that led out toward the road to Santiago de Compostela, in short, which already existed in Roman times.
1:11:14 I love Paris very much, where chance had me born. There you see it again. But I might just as well have been born on a ship. You know the coat of arms of Paris. It's a ship, fluctuat nec mergitur — a ship that, in Latin, floats but does not sink. Paris has seen worse. And Paris, which bears in its arms the bari, or mystic ship of the Egyptians — that's a half-delirious, half-humorous, half-fascinated etymology of Nerval's, isn't it?
1:11:45 And Paris, which bears in its arms the bari — a connection made purely for the sound of it, isn't it — from Paris to bari, or mystic ship of the Egyptians, does not have within its walls a hundred thousand true Parisians. People talk about native French now, about the great replacements. A man from the south, his father was from Agen, so from Aquitaine, uniting there, again by chance, with a woman from the north, from the mists of the Valois, cannot produce a child of Lutetian nature.
Studying others within myself 1:12:17 People will say that, depending on the reader, what does it matter — make enough detours and digressions like this, people will say that, what does it matter — but just ask people from the provinces whether it matters to be from one country or another. I don't know if these observations seem strange. Again, again, they're justified, since he's speaking about himself, he has trouble doing so. Seeking to study others within myself — a moment ago it was the experience of each and the treasure of all, and now it's the same thing, but in reverse.
1:12:48 It's not exactly seeking to study others within myself. By knowing myself a little better, I begin to understand humanity — not just my next-door neighbor, but humanity, which is within me and is within the other too, whatever I may think of the other. You know what makes me love to quote — that terrible confession of Hippolytus, where he makes his first declaration of love, he who thought he would never fall in love and spent his time hunting and performing heroic feats, leaving love to those who are effeminate.
1:13:22 Enslaved now under the common law, by what turmoil do I see myself carried away from myself. That's what studying within myself means, not others. I tell myself that in attachment to the land there is much of the love of family. This pity that attaches itself to a place is also a portion of the noble sentiment that unites us to the homeland. This was new at the time — the disasters of France in the exhausted state in which it found itself after the defeat at Waterloo, the occupation by foreign armies.
1:13:57 There's even a passage somewhere where he says he saw the mares of Ukraine eating the bark of our trees. All this meant that a rough sketch of national sentiment, more or less fantasized, emerged at the time. It's the era when the Gauls were being invented, when the image of the Gauls was being created. You see, mustaches and things like that. Which allowed Henri Salvador, as you know, to write a hilarious song. He was a West Indian who had been taught at school 'our ancestors the Gauls, with blond beards and big horses.'
1:14:27 On the other hand, towns and villages proudly adorn themselves — working out the dialectic of the particular, this village, this local culture, and the nation. You see the current problems. On the other hand, towns and villages proudly adorn themselves with the notable figures who come from their soil. There is no longer local division or jealousy. Everything relates back to the national center, and Paris is the hearth of all these glories. You may ask me why, and this is where I was heading — I love everyone in this country where I find intonations known long ago.
1:15:02 There, it's the ear picking up intonations. Where the old women have the features of those who cradled me. Where the young men and young girls remind me of the companions of my early youth. An old man passes by, I thought I saw my grandfather. He had almost his voice. This young woman has the features of my aunt who died at 25. A younger one reminds me — now pay close attention — of a peasant girl who was always dancing and singing and who, on Sundays in spring, used to make herself daisy crowns.
1:15:34 What has become of her, you heard — that wild young thing, what has become of the poor Célénie with whom I used to run through the forest of Chantilly, and who was so afraid of gamekeepers and wolves? Let's go on. We come now to some strong moments. The closer we get toward the East, the denser the language becomes, the more the prose becomes poetic, the more the place-names multiply. The poetry of proper names. Here are the two towers of Saint-Leu, the village on the height separated by the railway from the part that borders the Oise.
1:16:09 We climb toward Chantilly, skirting high sandstone hills of a solemn aspect. Then comes a stretch of forest, the Nonette shines in the meadows, still bordering along its banks the last houses of the town. The Nonette, one of the dear little rivers where I fished for crayfish. On the other side flows its sister, the Thève, where I nearly drowned for not wanting to seem a coward in front of little Célénie. Here, even though I try to keep the segments short, I'm forced to lengthen this one because something extraordinary is happening at the level of Nerval's pen.
The shore as a conversion; Célénie and the moon 1:16:47 I'm going to disappear from the screen for a moment because I'm going to read you another text. I want to stress that I've paused the text of Promenades et souvenirs for a text that's very close, but well, very close geographically, thematically, and chronologically, since it's written practically in the same years. So on what theme did I pause? On drowning. He was talking about rivers. I told you, you know, that a bank, a shore, is always perilous.
1:17:19 Here I'm digging a bit, going back to the general, right? A shore, an edge, is always what in computing is called a switching. I know nothing about computing, but I understood that much. It's a conversion. Of what, you ask? From the horizontal, if it's a cliff, or the vertical. The edge is dangerous, you shouldn't lean too far over. Or else from the solid — the bank — to the flow of the river. You mustn't drown. I don't know. And that's what edges are.
1:17:50 So, in the symbolic order, I don't know, what could be more delightful than a shore, I don't know, a lovely beach — though on a stormy day you have to be careful not to be caught, as if by an elephant's trunk, by a wave stronger than the others. But in the symbolic order, in texts, if you will, it doesn't escape this notion of an edge. Edge, I mean at the semantic level, can be shore, bank, border — you say it well, careful, it's a bit borderline — what charm drew him to these dreaded shores.
1:18:28 And when we say to Hippolytus, listen, you were happy here, why do you want to leave? That hour is no more, everything has changed face since on these shores the gods sent the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë. So, he was on the banks of the Nonette, a pretty charming little river, and its sister the Thève in which he nearly drowned — I repeat it word for word — so as not to appear a coward in the eyes of the little wild girl he had just spoken of, the little peasant girl with the eyes of little Célénie.
1:19:07 This is where you'll see that you mustn't put too much faith in the idea that he's talking about real events. We're in the symbolic order. I'm not interpreting, because it's enough to analyze the name Célénie. It's one of the many names for the Moon, and Nerval knows this better than anyone. That's initiatory. Selenie, moreover — at the beginning of the space race, the first landings on the Moon, people used to say, you shouldn't say 'land,' since it's not the Earth, we should say 'selenize' instead.
1:19:37 Célénie is the Moon. The planet most heavily charged with symbolic weight, no doubt, even though it's derisory in mass compared to Jupiter. But on the other hand, in the imagination, look at history, how the Moon is represented — and not only in a 'Moonlight Sonata,' which Beethoven never called that — the Moon and the Sun are the two heavenly bodies most heavily laden with meaning, aren't they? The sun has a rendezvous with the moon, and the moon is not there, and the sun waits.
1:20:07 Charles Trenet, there, we're not in astronomy, the stakes are more serious. So, I mustn't appear a coward in the eyes of little Célénie — this Célénie who will appear under another name elsewhere; we'll see that the same drowning scene recurs, in a few lines of a text I'm going to read you. But for now, I want to tell you about the drowning text in question, under another name, before returning to the text we started from, where he speaks of a drowning, but in connection with a Célénie.
1:20:41 And at Chantilly — well, since he's speaking of it there — between Senlis and Ermenonville. Let's go there. He's in Senlis; so I'm getting ahead here, we'll get to it soon in Promenades et souvenirs; here it's in Angélique, in Les Filles du Feu, where it took a while to get there, we stayed a long time in Paris, in search of a book this time, not a lodging. Always a quest, a pretext, but to return to the same places, to Rousseau's tomb, not too far from the mother's tomb. And the avenues surrounding Senlis, which replace those ancient Roman fortifications later restored following the long sojourn of the Carolingian kings, now offer to the eye nothing but the rusty leaves of elms and lindens.
1:21:22 And yes, we're in autumn. That is, departures par excellence — that is, migrating birds, isn't it? However, the view is still lovely all around at a beautiful sunset. I note, don't I, a double decline of the year — autumn — and of the day, sunset. This is called overdetermination. The forests of Chantilly, I mean, it's possible that chance brought him to Senlis in autumn, granted, but that superimposed upon it, aren't they, the decline of the day and the decline of the year, in the same vision, a bit melancholy, at the moment when he speaks of mourning.
1:21:58 That's no accident. The forests of Chantilly, of Compiègne, and of Ermenonville, the woods of Châalis and Pontarmé — the magic of place-names — stand out in their reddish mass against the light green of the meadows separating them. Distant châteaux still raise their towers, solidly built in Senlis stone, which generally now serve only as pigeon-lofts. Sharp-pointed steeples bristling with regular projections that are called in the region 'bones' — the most characteristic, if you look it up on Google Images, is Senlis cathedral.
1:22:28 The whole steeple looks like the bones of cetaceans, whale vertebrae. I don't know why, they still resound with that sound of bells which brought a gentle melancholy into the soul of Rousseau. We're getting close to Rousseau's tomb. Rousseau isn't from there at all, he's from Switzerland. How does all this end up in such a small space? Yes, I'd like to come back to the bones, because there's even less chance involved than you might think. Even less than you think, for those who believe I'm overdoing it, that I find meaning everywhere.
1:23:02 I could give you many texts that show there's much to say about bones. When he's in Paris, in the Halles district, and sees by moonlight, in Les Nuits d'octobre, over the cathedral, Saint-Eustache — everyone knows it, which dominates the Halles, isn't it — and he says, you'd think it a cetacean's skeleton, and the bones of fairy tales. In short, I could easily prove it to you in the text, but we don't have time. It would require specialized Nervalian studies. But as for the bells too, right — well, another sound — remember the bell in Kafka's Castle.
1:23:37 The steeples still resound with that sound of bells which brought a gentle melancholy into Rousseau's soul. An allusion to passages from the Confessions. Achieving — the name of Rousseau reminds him that there's a goal, among the thousand goals he's proposed to us, the latest one, this is it, we mustn't abandon it after all — the pilgrimage we promised ourselves to make. Not near his ashes — well, I thought we were going to his tomb. Ah yes, yes, there's the monument, that's not where his ashes were placed, but at the time of the Revolution, the Convention, the greatest government France has ever had, the metric system, well, along with that of the Liberation — accomplishing the pilgrimage near his ashes, which rest in the Panthéon.
Rousseau's tomb and autumn breathed in with happiness 1:24:22 That's the tomb, that's Rousseau's tomb, the least fetishistic tomb there is. Rousseau's remains aren't there — they're in the Panthéon. The Revolution came to fetch the ashes of the one who wrote The Social Contract to bring them to the Panthéon in homage — not at night with torches, but the tomb remained, and the whole world, even the Japanese come frequently to see Rousseau's tomb on the Île des Peupliers, at Ermenonville — this island, which is the barycenter of all Nerval's movements, the center of gravity.
1:24:53 Not near his ashes, which rest in the Panthéon, but near his tomb, located at Ermenonville, on the Île des Peupliers. He has trouble leaving Senlis, you see, like a black hole, light can't escape it. The church of Saint-Pierre, which today serves as barracks for the cuirassiers — more uniforms. The château of Henri IV, backed against the old fortifications of the town, well, everything that might be of interest. The Byzantine cloisters of Charles the Fat and his successors. This enumeration is no accident, it shows the whole temporal thickness of a town like Senlis.
1:25:27 Nothing here should hold us back. It's still time — again in the mood of Schubert's music — to wander through the woods despite the stubborn morning mist. A sound of footsteps is about to set off. We left Senlis on foot, through the woods, breathing in with happiness the autumn mist, aspiring to death with happiness. It took the modern world, Romanticism, the first expression of sensibility of the post-revolutionary era, for what used to be called the bad season to become the favorite season.
1:26:07 We breathe in with happiness the autumn mist. This delightful smell, this smell of humus when you gather mushrooms, you all know this, it's an intoxication. Humus, humus — but good Lord, it's posthumous, it's the earth of cemeteries, it's the decomposition of leaves — how strange human sensibility is. What do we prefer? In cheese or in milk, if not the molds — I'm thinking of Roquefort, of sheep's cheese. What is wine, if not rotten, fermented, altered grape juice? It's strange.
1:26:43 So, looking at the great trees — we left Senlis on foot, through the woods, breathing in with happiness the autumn mist. And here, you see, when you read the text of Angélique, the passage that follows isn't there. It was censored by Nerval. I brought back the primitive version, which is found only very rarely, here it's in the Pléiade or on Wikisource, of the story that served as the matrix for Angélique, the first of Les Filles du feu, and where there are passages that were removed from Angélique, including the one I'm going to read you now.
1:27:20 So, I'm going to do violence to Nervalian modesty. But since it's there that he speaks of the drowning episode — good Lord! It's a real detective story, it's extraordinary, though not a detective story where the stakes lie in knowing who killed, who is the culprit, isn't it? Here, we know right away who died. 'The thirteenth returns, she is again the first, and she is always the only one or the one of the only moment, she is death or the dead one, delight or torment.'
1:27:52 But that sentence — we left Senlis on foot, through the woods, breathing in with happiness the autumn mist. Now, before the drowning, I want to point out that we're walking, we're fine, legs carrying us — the opposite of legs giving way in the water, drowning. To walk, you need ground that holds you up, there mustn't be too much snow or too much sand — you've all walked in sand, in dunes, in snow, it's hard, it weighs down your steps.
1:28:22 Believe someone who's done a fair bit of trekking in the Sahara, hasn't he? Or who saw — someone nearly died of cold whom I had to pull out, wasn't he a bit heavy, he had trouble getting his legs out, sunk up to the groin like that in the snow, when there were the great cold spells. Let's not stray. In 2007, there were several deaths on the Tour de la Lac. Looking at the great trees — so up to here, this is part of the text of Angélique that was kept.
The censored passage of Angélique: the drowning 1:28:52 We left Senlis, on foot, through the woods, breathing in with happiness the autumn mist. From here on, I'm restoring a necessary passage that was censored. Looking at the great trees which kept at their summit only a bunch of yellowed leaves — first observation, and no, I'm not exaggerating, it's algebra. Good Lord, I'd like people to understand that the human sciences have as much determinability, as much predictability, as eclipses do in astronomy. Looking at the great trees means that the gaze now stops looking ahead toward the horizon, it's no longer horizontal like walking.
1:29:27 Walking is suspended. We're looking — it's the vertical dimension, from bottom to top — looking at the great trees which kept at their summit… My brow is still red from the queen's kiss. …only a bunch of yellowed leaves, for the sun struck them harshly. My friend Sylvain — for he's traveling with a friend, another friend, with a symbolic name. Sylvain, the man of the forests, Sylvain, man of the woods. Nerval's most famous text is Sylvie, which we'll come to, you'll see, even though this particular story is called Angélique.
1:30:00 'Do you remember the time when we roamed through these woods?' It's Sylvain who says this. He's the little local peasant who travels with him, whom he sees again every time he comes back to his village. 'When your parents let you come to our place' — a difference of social class, he's the little Parisian with varnished shoes, whereas he had other relatives — 'when we went to pull crayfish out from under the stones, under the bridges of the Nonette and the Oise, you took care to remove your stockings and shoes, and we called you little Parisian.'
1:30:32 'I remember,' I told him, 'that you once abandoned me in danger. It was an eddy of the Oise, near the mill. I absolutely wanted to cross the water to get back by a shorter path to my nurse's house.' You said — it's the little peasant who's supposed to know every corner — 'we can cross.' The long grasses and that green scum — he's told you that shores are dangerous. The long grasses and that green scum floating in the bends of our rivers gave me the idea that the place wasn't deep.
1:31:02 I went in first, then I plunged into seven feet of water — more than two meters deep. So you fled, fearing you'd be accused of having let the little Parisian drown, and resolved to say, if asked for news of him, that he had gone wherever he wanted. There you have it, friends. Sylvain blushed and did not answer. It's this eruption of the dramatic into a text that had until then been purely lyrical that Nerval suppressed. But here's the most important passage.
1:31:34 So one runs off. But your sister — so there were three of them playing like kids. The little girl, there she is. The one who will serve as the model for Celenie, whom I'll come back to — I had interrupted the Celenie, the one who covered her forehead with daisy flowers, the little yellow savage whose finest text hasn't come yet but it awaits us. But your sister — and it's repeated, your sister who was following us, poor little girl — while it's he who is in danger. There, poor Sylvie. Poor Sylvie, while I was cutting my hands trying to hold on after my dive, on the sharp leaves of the irises.
1:32:09 But it's a beautiful thing. After my dive, holding on to the sharp leaves of the irises, she threw herself flat on her stomach on the bank. She pulled me by the hair with all her strength, saved from drowning by the little girl. Poor Sylvie, said my friend crying, is she dead? We don't know. You understand, I replied, that I owe you nothing. Yes, I taught you to climb trees. Here, magpie nests — again the vertical dimension, the one that runs from the bottom of the water to the top of the trees, the ground that no longer holds.
Célénie, a Germanic nixie; Apollinaire's Nuit rhénane 1:32:45 Here, magpie nests still swaying on the poplars and the chestnut trees. I taught you to go fetch them, as well as the woodpeckers' nests set higher up in spring. Being a Parisian, you had to attach iron spikes to your shoes, whereas I, I, a peasant — it reminds me of Africans climbing palm trees — I climbed barefoot. Sylvain, let's not give in to recriminations, let's go see the tomb where Rousseau's ashes are missing.
1:33:15 So the tomb, a pure sign, since the ashes are not there. What does Rousseau's disappearance mean? Let's stay calm. The memories he left here are worth as much as his remains. There's the passage heavy with meaning, isn't it, which was quickly done away with. But let's return to Promenades et souvenirs. Magic, technique — that is to say, human beings, thanks Pierre-Alain — brings us back to the text we had left suspended, where he spoke of Celenie, didn't he, the passage where, speaking of the river the Nonette, he says: this river where I nearly drowned so as not to seem a coward in front of little Celenie, and I have kept a reserve ever since.
1:34:04 This predicate of Celenie unfolds like a fabric being unrolled, whose seed would be that first name. Celenie often appears to me in my dreams. She is a creature of the waters — the moon, the water, the night, it all goes together. Celenie often appears to me in my dreams as a water nymph, a naive temptress, wildly intoxicated by the scent of the meadows, crowned with water parsley and water lilies, revealing in her childlike laugh, between her dimpled cheeks, the pearly teeth of the Germanic nix.
1:34:38 The nix, that's the little figures, the water sprites, the freshwater mermaids. The Germanic nix, like all nixes, like the Lorelei, isn't it? With her song she can trap boatmen — not Ulysses' sailors, but the boatmen on the Rhine who smash against the rock, so overcome are they by the beauty of the Lorelei's song. All German schoolchildren know Heine's poem about it, don't they? Ah, there's a magnificent one in French too, by Apollinaire, in Rhenish Night: my glass is full of a wine trembling like a flame.
1:35:13 Listen to the slow song of the boatman who says he saw, toward the Rhine, seven women twisting their long green hair down to their feet. And there, the waves. The Rhine, the Rhine is drunk, the vines are reflected. All the gold of the nights falls trembling. Nothing stands upright in this text. Falls trembling to be reflected there. It began with my glass full of a wine trembling like a flame. All the gold of the nights falls trembling to be reflected there. One might think of Van Gogh's painting, the bridge at Arles, isn't it, over the Rhône, the stars swirling, don't they?
1:35:48 All the gold of the nights falls trembling to be reflected there. The voice keeps singing to the point of a death rattle: my glass has shattered like a burst of laughter. There's all that. This girl is a bit of a wild creature, but almost magical too. It's the one — the nix — who often appears in my dreams. I go back over the whole text. It's a prose poem of great density. Like a water nymph, a naive temptress, wildly intoxicated by the scent of the meadows, crowned with water parsley and water lilies.
1:36:20 Revealing in her childlike laugh, between her dimpled cheeks, the pearly teeth of the Germanic nix. And indeed, I had told you to hold onto the edges. The hem of her dress was very often wet, as befits her kind. And yes, the water sprites. One had to pick flowers for her and take risks on the banks. One had to gather flowers for her on the marshy edges of the ponds of Commelle. Go one day to the ponds of Commelle near Chantilly — it's a marvel, that place. Or among the reeds and the willow groves that border — and they say there's chance in texts — that border the farmsteads of Coye, what place names there are.
1:36:59 She loved caves lost in the woods, the ruins of old castles, temples collapsed with columns festooned in ivy, the woodcutters' hearth where she sang and told the old legends of the countryside. It's nests perched on rocks or on druidic dolmens, and she told the legends to the young shepherds. This little Velleda, another Germanic divinity, from the old land of the Sylvanectes — Sylvie, Sylvanectes — has left me memories that time revives.
1:37:30 What has become of her? I'll ask around — and again a place name that rhymes with Nerval — I'll ask around at La Chapelle-en-Serval, we're getting close, or at Charlepont, or at Montmélian. She had aunts everywhere, cousins without number — how much death in all that. Again, you see, this undertone of mourning and melancholy — how much unhappiness, no doubt, in a country once so happy. So here he arrives by train at Chantilly, I skipped a bit — it's on the train to Chantilly that the memory of little Celenie came back to him, remember.
1:38:05 Because when I arrived at Chantilly — it's one of the most beautiful châteaux in France, the park at Chantilly, probably the most beautiful in Île-de-France along with Versailles, well, smaller but probably the most beautiful — with Le Nôtre too, the designer of the Grand Canal. I recommend you go eat there. I don't want to seem sexist, but I say especially, ladies, because there's red and white. There's the farm, as in Marie-Antoinette's time — there's the farm in the château of Chantilly which has been restored, and you eat strawberries with Chantilly cream in the château of Chantilly. Honestly, it's worth it.
The stables of Chantilly, Clouscard and the innkeeper's daughter 1:38:35 Nothing is stranger than this great gate which opens onto the château's lawn and looks like a triumphal arch, like the neighboring monument which looks like a basilica and is only a stable. Now, I'm sorry for those who already know this, but I can't not talk about Clouscard. I strolled around there with our friend Clouscard. And I was preparing him for the sight — he didn't know the château of Chantilly. I told him he was going to see the château of Chantilly, it's fantastic, it's really one of the finest, etc.
1:39:07 And then we pass in front of the stables, by Nerval's route. He says, "Ah damn, it's true, the château is fantastic." I tell him, "No, that's not the château, that's the stables." I tell him, "The château, it's still 800 meters away." And then suddenly, he was speechless. "It's for the nags," I quote him word for word, "it's for the nags that they built this." He says, "Damn, it makes local hobbyist work look small next to it. That's the ancien régime, watch out, nobody was joking around." End of quote. Nothing is stranger than this great gate which opens onto the château's lawn and looks like a triumphal arch, like the neighboring monument which looks like a basilica and is only a stable.
1:39:45 Everything appears to be and is not that. The world of theater which fascinated Nerval. This gate that opens like that, like the three knocks before a play. There's still something there of the struggle of the Condés. The Condés, their stronghold is Chantilly, isn't it? The Condés against the elder branch of the Bourbons. The Condé had rebelled during the troubles of the Fronde against royal power; afterward he was pardoned because he saved the kingdom at Rocroi. There's still something there of the struggle of the Condés against the elder branch of the Bourbons.
1:40:18 It's hunting that triumphs in the absence of war. I tell you, it's the finest museum of hunting and venery, and you take up hunting when you can no longer make war. Now royal power is centralized. The great lords can no longer go to war or rebel against the king. So they console themselves with the hunt. Well, it's not a simple subject. Or this family finding glory again after Clio had torn up the pages of the great Condé's warrior youth, amusing itself with history, as expressed by the melancholy painting he had made himself. What's the use now, again almost a mourning, of revisiting this stripped château which retains nothing but Watteau's satirical cabinet?
1:40:54 And the tragic shadow of the cook Vatel piercing his heart on a fruit knife? The fabled cook of Louis XIV who killed himself, who pierced his heart on a fruit knife because, at the moment of a great hunt and an immense banquet with the king, the fish arrived late by way of the Rue Poissonnière, packed in ice. That's how it was back then. I preferred to hear the sincere regrets — here we get to important things — of my hostess, a good woman who was showing him around the château, concerning this good Prince de Condé who is still the subject of local conversations.
1:41:29 There is in these kinds of towns something similar to those circles of Dante's Purgatory — I spoke of a spiral — immobilized in a single memory, that's why I spoke of a pocket, isn't it, or of folds, as you like, of memory, where the deeds of past life are replayed within a narrower circle. So the hostess speaks to him: there, the great Condé had this painting made, and Nerval: "And what became of your daughter who was so blonde and cheerful?"
1:42:01 I said, "Are they all married?" "My God, yes, since then, she died of consumption." I hardly dare say that this struck me more forcefully than the memories of the Prince de Condé. I had seen her quite young, and there — listen closely, it's incredible, texts like this — and indeed I would have loved her had my heart at that time not been occupied with another. And now here I am thinking of the German ballad, the innkeeper's daughter, and the three companions, one of whom said, "Oh, had I known her, how I would have loved her."
1:42:41 And the second: "I knew you, I loved you tenderly." And the third: "I did not know you, but I love you and will love you for eternity." Another blonde figure that pales, detaches, and falls frozen on the horizon of these woods bathed in grey mist. I took the coach to Senlis, so it's no longer the train, it's a coach.
1:43:12 Saint-Germain, Chantilly, Senlis — I skipped Pontoise — which follows the course of the Nonette, passing through Saint-Firmin and Courteuil, again, you see the place names. We leave to our left Saint-Léonard and Sainte-Geneviève-la-Chapelle. We already glimpse the tall bell tower of the cathedral. It's a bit like Chartres, emerging from the wheat fields. In the Beauce, you can see it from the horizon, can't you? The cathedral of Senlis is one of the finest in Christendom. Its spire, isn't it.
1:43:42 He walks on this flat ground where there are either fields or forests. Here it's fields. To the left is the field of the queens, R-E-I-N-E-S, where Saint-Rieul, interrupted by frogs during one of his sermons — it's a cute legend — silenced the frogs. When he was done — since a whole army of frogs makes such a racket — he allowed only one to make itself heard from then on. There is something, says Nerval, who knows something about it, oriental in this naive legend, and in this kindness of the saint who allows at least one frog — a kind of union delegate, one might quip — to express the complaints of the others.
The tumblers' caravan: nomad and settler 1:44:28 I'm taking detours, alright, this is the end. They found no lodging. Wait, wait, there are still a few lines left. Passing before the Reims gate, I came upon one of those enormous traveling-showman's wagons. I thank Pierre-Alain for having found — where better to find it — this illustration in Tintin of traveling people making music. That magnificent image where you see Tintin simply say in the speech bubble: what nostalgia in this music.
1:44:58 He wasn't afraid of the great replacement, him. And you might say, he has a château of soap, fine, I sense what others will say — it's not you who lives with them. Well, let's move on — Snowy, who is pensive, looking toward the moon and toward those people, isn't he — passing before the Reims gate, I came upon one of those enormous traveling-showman's wagons that go from fair to fair. So we're not done with nomadism, wherever God takes us. It's going to end and yet we move more than ever.
1:45:31 from fair to fair, a whole artistic family, its equipment and its household. It had begun to rain and I was cordially offered shelter — and there, for the first time, he finds himself in — what does he say? — the local. A local space. Not just a place. A place could be an open field. A local space. A shelter. A home of one's own. It's not his own home, but still, it's somebody's home. It's a house. It's a hearth. A hearth that moves. Good grief.
1:46:02 We were hesitating: nomad or sedentary. And now we're going to have both. But here's the solution. Good grief, look. The space was vast, heated by a stove — remember the soldiers back at the château putting wood in the fireplace because it was getting cold. So, nice touch. The space was vast, heated by a stove, lit by eight windows. A fine caravan. Four windows on one side, four on the other. And is that all? But what do they do in it? Six people seemed to live there quite comfortably.
1:46:35 Two pretty girls were busy mending their spangled costumes. You can feel it coming — it's the world of theater and spectacle. Oh, the Comédie-Française? No, it's the traveling people. They do a bit of commedia dell'arte, acrobatics, little vaudeville pieces. They aren't allowed to perform modern plays, for reasons of privilege. All that will be said. Two pretty girls — Nerval's dream, the theater. The best book written on Nerval is by a lady I salute here, Gabrielle Malandain, who gave it a very fine title: Nerval, ou l'incendie du théâtre.
1:47:10 I won't say more. Read it, it's hard to find. Two pretty girls were busy mending their spangled costumes. A woman, still handsome, was cooking, no doubt the lady of the house, and the head of the family was giving lessons in bearing to a good-looking young man whom he was training to play the lovers' roles. Well, they're rehearsing, we're at the theater — backstage, in fact. It's that these people weren't limited to feats of agility and also performed comedy.
1:47:40 They were often invited into châteaux. You see, Nerval, who already had a fondness in his newspaper accounts — he did, I don't know, a review of all the plays being performed on the boulevards, where there was a mix of everything. But what he adored was the Théâtre des Funambules, which is spoken of in Children of Paradise, where there are more mimes. That's why it's the poor who get to reach paradise in that theater, because there's so much movement, farce, commedia dell'arte. They were often invited into provincial châteaux and they showed me several certificates of their talents, signed by illustrious names.
1:48:17 One of the young girls began declaiming verses from an old comedy dating at least from Montfleury's time, since the new repertoire is forbidden to them. They also perform pieces impromptu — freestyle, as we'd say today — on Italian-style scenarios, with great ease of invention and repartee. Careful, this is the end. Watching the two young girls, one lively and dark-haired, the other blonde and laughing, I began to think of Mignon.
1:48:48 Our first analytic reverie was called Mignon. I pick up another text and I land on Mignon again at the end. And yet we're not in Germany. Watching the two young girls, one lively and dark-haired, the other blonde and laughing, I began to think of Mignon and Philine, the two girls, in Wilhelm Meister. And there, a Germanic dream comes back to me, between him and the mother's tomb, and all of Germany, isn't it? And there, a Germanic dream comes back to me, between the perspective of the woods and the ancient profile of Senlis.
1:49:24 Why not stay in this wandering house, for lack of a Parisian home? There's the solution. But it's no longer time to indulge these fancies of the green bohemian life, and I took leave of my hosts, for the rain had stopped. I'm sorry to take my leave of you, of course, to leave you — I'm not sorry that you... I know you're quite entitled to do something other than listen to me. I'm sorry not to continue such a fine text, but it's only postponed.
1:49:58 You'll see that we'll come back to it next time, quite quickly, as an appendix if you like, to this third analytic reverie, with two other scenes of female song in very neighboring texts: Adrienne's song from Sylvie, and the young girls' song at Senlis on the steps of the cathedral. In any case, thank you for your patience, and I hope you'll think about this solution.
1:50:33 I'm not saying buy a caravan. A mobile home. Mobile home. It's not dialectical, notions like that. Mobile home. Good night.
