Gérard de NERVAL leaves Vienna penniless and worried about his articles.

Gérard de NERVAL (1808.1855)

Autograph letter signed to Jules Michel.

Two pages in-12° in tight writing.

Vienna February 26 [1840]

“I would like this to put a little inspiration back into my heart, I tremble to put on my soap opera collar again. »

Nerval leaves Vienna penniless and worried about his articles to be published in Paris.

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“My dear Sir, I am very ashamed to write to you from so far away precisely to ask you for a service; but here is the circumstance; it is serious and you will judge it as such by thinking of the effort it took me to explain it to you. I have been in Vienna, as you know, for 4 months. My time is up, I would still live very well here, but I have not been sent any capital to return, no doubt given the uncertainty of business. Tired of waiting from day to day, I have just sent articles to Paris for around two hundred francs. I have some at the Artist and others that I passed to [Alphonse] Karr and to Théo [Théophile Gautier], to place them. I'm leaving in four to five days with barely enough money to reach Strasbourg. There, I would like to find, for sure , fifty francs and I was going to send the attached article to Karr to direct me the sum, as he does for the others - but now I am afraid that my two 1 ^erst articles have not had the time to go through both yet, so that there is no congestion […] I would really need to find the thing there, finding myself in the same boat as two years ago years, that I do not hesitate to address you. You know that this is not my habit, and I am only telling you this to justify the waste of time that this will cause you. Here is how the affair will be liquidated. Please have the article delivered to Karr – I beg him to have the money handed over to you as soon as he gets it, and I am sure it will be almost immediately. […]

This is the survival I am asking of you, if that is possible. I think the most certain thing would be to put a postal order in a letter, or to send it to me through a banker, but I believe that the latter method takes the longest. Also be good enough to stamp and write down my names clearly, so that I can contact Mr. Labrunie de Nerval Gérard with my passport. Position remaining in Strasbourg. You understand immediately how much I will bless you at the sight of this address.

Besides, don't pity me too much, this is just an accident that always happens to me when traveling due to my lack of foresight. It must also be said that the stay in Vienna is much more expensive than I thought, especially because of the company I have to see. Once I regained my footing in Paris, I immediately flourished again.

So I take the traveling stick with confidence and go my three hundred and fifty leagues, feeling that Paris is as far from Vienna as Vienna is from Paris. […] I think that I will arrive in time to see your play and I would like it to put a little inspiration back into my heart, I tremble to take up my soap opera necklace , or to indulge again in the uncertain favor lessons … "

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Vienna was a place of major emotional experience for Nerval during the winter of 1839-1840 when he obtained a mission from the ministry which would give him, he believed, the stable social and financial position which he always lacked. Also, under the patronage of Sterne, Casanova and Hoffmann, he undertook to transfigure through writing his enthusiasm as a traveler, already visible in his correspondence with his father, his observation of diplomatic life, his experience of Austrian salons and his wanderings. sentimental. Thus were born the Travel Letters published in “La Presse”, the dramatic scenarios of The  Three Workers of Nuremberg  and the  Magnetizer inspired by Hoffmann and Grétry, portraits of writers for the Viennese newspapers, the Loves of Vienna sent to Gautier which, after publication in the “Revue de Paris”, ended up integrating Le Voyage en Orient as a stopover towards Constantinople.

But the “catastrophe” as Nerval calls it – the seizure of one of his letters by the censor – aroused the need for a metamorphosis of reality which finally found its outcome in Pandora . Her fascination with the pianist Marie Pleyel, reviewed in Brussels in the shadow of Jenny Colon, gave full scope to this inspiration who continued until the crises of 1841 and 1853-1854 the inaccessible quest for the love dreamed of before Aurélia .

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Complete works (Pléiade, ed. Guillaume-Pichois), t. I, p. 1343.

Gérard de Nerval, Pandora and other Viennese stories. Sylvie Lécuyer.