Sylvie & The Chimeras

Sylvie and The Chimeras are two of French author Gérard de Nerval (AD 1808-1855)ʼs best-known works.

Sylvie, a novella, is by all accounts his masterpiece; it was first published in July 1853 in the Revue des Deux-Mondes, a periodical. It is a Romantic tale of the love of a young man from Paris for two women, one a childhood sweetheart from Valois, and the other a stage actress in Paris. It is a tale of longing, misgiving, and nostalgia for the past, with the dreamy landscape of Valois as the backdrop. Immediately before having written the novella, Nerval had suffered several bouts of mental illness. After its publication, he was again seized, but more seriously this time, rushed off to the nearest hospital, and put into a straitjacket. In 1854, Sylvie was published in book format, in the collection entitled Les Filles du Feu.

The Chimeras is a collection of poems, all in sonnet format. They were written over the course of several years, from as early as 1843 and as late as 1854, a year before the author passed away. Of them "El Desdichado" and "Christ in the Garden of Olives" (itself a collection of five sonnets) are the most famous. Although some of the poems were published in magazines previously, the entirety of them were published as part of Les Filles du Feu.

In the appendix is a short excerpt from the biography by Henri Strentz, published in 1911, which includes a discussion of the events leading up to Nervalʼs mental illnesses, his writing of Sylvie, and the squalid details surrounding his death by hanging by his own hand.