NERVAL, GERARD DE (18o8-1855), the adopted name of Gerard Labrunie, French man of letters, born in Paris on May 22, 1808. His father was an army doctor, and the child was left with an uncle in the country, while Mme. Labrunie accompanied her husband in his campaigns. She died in Silesia. In 1811 his father returned, and beside Greek and Latin taught the boy mod ern languages and the elements of Arabic and Persian. Gerard found his favourite reading in old books on mysticism and the occult sciences. His first work, La France guerriere, elegies na tionales, was published while he was still a schoolboy at the Col lege Charlemagne. In 1828 he published a translation of Goethe's Faust, the choruses of which were afterwards used by Berlioz for his legend-symphony, The Damnation of Faust. A number of poetical pieces and three comedies combined to acquire for him, at the age of 21, a considerable reputation, and led to his associa tion with Theophile Gautier in the preparation of the dramatic feuilleton for the Presse. He conceived a violent passion for the actress Jennie Colon, in whom he thought he recognized a certain Adrienne, who had fired his childish imagination. Her marriage and her death in 1842 were blows from which his nervous tempera ment never really recovered. He travelled in Germany with Alex andre Dumas, and alone in various parts of Europe, leading a very irregular and eccentric life. In 1843 he visited Constantinople and Syria, where, among other adventures, he nearly married the daughter of a Druse sheikh. He contributed accounts of his
travels to the Revue des Deux Mondes and other periodicals. After his return to Paris in 1844 he resumed for a short time his feuilleton for the Presse, but his eccentricities increased and he committed suicide by hanging, on Jan. 25, 1855. The literary style of Gerard is simple and unaffected, and he has a peculiar faculty of giving to his imaginative creations an air of natural ness and reality. In a series of novelettes, afterwards published under the name of Les Illumines, ou les precurseurs du socialisme (1852), containing studies on Retif de la Bretonne, Cagliostro and others, he gave a sort of analysis of the feelings which fol lowed his third attack of insanity. Among his other works the principal are Les Filles du feu (1854), which contains his mas terpiece, the semi-autobiographical romance of Sylvia; Scenes de la vie orientale (1848-50 ; Contes et faceties (1852) ; La Boheme galante (1856) ; and L'Alchimiste, a drama in five acts, the joint composition of Gerard and Alexandre Dumas. His Poesies com pletes were published in 1877.
See the notices by Theophile Gautier and Arsene Houssaye, prefixed to the posthumous Le Rive et la vie (1855) ; Maurice Tourneux's sketch in his Age du romantisme (1887) ; and a sympathetic study of temperament in the Nevroses (1898) of Mme. Arvede Barine. See also G. Ferrieres, Gerard de Nerval (1906).