[In the excerpt below, Fairlie examines themes, form, and tone in Sylvie.]

Sylvie used to be read as a delightful country idyll. Reaction set in and it became 'le poème de la fin du monde', a 'bilan de la faillite'—'Sylvie s'achève en débâcle'. Here I disagree, and think that the undertones of the last chapter have been overlooked, and with them some of the use of themes and form throughout the story.

The outline is simple: the narrator had pursued in the actress Aurélie the reflection of the 'idéal sublime' once seen in the child Adrienne; not only had this reflection of the ideal proved illusory but in its pursuit he had let slip Sylvie, 'la douce réalité'. Summarized in this form, it sounds like an obvious temptation to various kinds of insufferable romanticization: it might either glorify the ideal as a metaphysical super-reality, or twist round to give an equally spurious glorification to the lost Sylvie, or finally exalt loss, anguish and hankering after the impossible as superior values in themselves. And the story is often presented as if Nerval were doing one or other or all of these. Quite the contrary. The obsession by Adrienne and Aurélie is worked out not in supernatural but in human terms, and every detail of background is made to suggest that it is as fallacious as it is gripping and lovely. The narrator is neither psychopath nor prophet; he analyses lucidly the conditions which cause sensitive minds in his generation to set woman on a pedestal and fear to approach her, since feelings have been distorted in the moulds both of inherited idealism and of inherited cynicism. Then, though Adrienne deliberately suggests the archetypal figures of Queen and Saint, Aurélie the Enchantress and the Siren, and Sylvie the strange Fairy, yet the sense of dream and illusion that surrounds them is woven from the live details of an everyday world with its children's games and folk-songs, its plays in the convent or on the Paris stage. The hero is haunted by the idea that Aurélie strangely recalls Adrienne, but the echoes between them are called up in terms of the real world, by suggestive sense-impressions of the two kinds most evocative in Nerval: play of light and modulations of voice. Aurélie sings on the stage as Adrienne had in the garden or the convent play; the stage lighting casts a circle round her head as the moon in the garden or the halo in the mystery-play had done for Adrienne. And constantly the illusory nature of his worship is suggested. From the first sentence he mocks gently at his passion as he sits every night in the theatre 'en grande tenue de soupirant', among a thinly-scattered audience in frumpish clothes, watching his idol in a second-rate play. Adrienne is made mysterious by the half-light of sunset or moonrise, and wreathed in swirls of evening mist; in the convent play her halo is of gilded cardboard. Lucidly and consciously the dream is presented as lovely but a mere imagining: the narrator punctures it with 'Reprenons pied sur le réel', Aurélie with her pointed 'Vous cherchez un drame, voilà tout', and Sylvie, questioned as to any strange connection between Adrienne and Aurélie, with a burst of gay laughter at the very idea.

The pursuit of the ideal proved illusory, and because of it he has lost Sylvie. Here was the opportunity for the large-scale disillusion in romantic terms: Nerval has delicately avoided it. There is no psychological analysis, simply the tiny details of everyday life which the reader must juxtapose with the past: the Sylvie who had never heard of Rousseau now reads La Nouvelle Héloise and sees the countryside in terms of Walter Scott; instead of sitting with her green cushion and lace-bobbins she works in a glove-factory; in her bedroom the old-fashioned 'trumeau' has given place to something more modern; instead of folk-songs she sings fashionable operas in sophisticated style. She had seemed the opposite of Aurélie, but she has followed the same pattern: Aurélie will marry the devoted and useful 'jeune premier ridé' and Sylvie too realizes that 'il faut songer au solide' so is engaged to the village baker. Yet he does not erect her into a lost ideal in her turn: when he reflects on what he might have had it is in the form: 'Là était le bonheur peut-être, cependant

Nerval has refused to inflate either dream or reality, or to confuse the two. His particular sense of irony is vital; an irony quite without bitterness. When the narrator comes back to beg Sylvie to save him from his obsessions, at the key point we have what might have been seen as the Interruption of Fate. But here it is no large-scale incident or dramatic lamentation: simply Sylvie's brother and the baker in a benevolent state of post-ball fuddledness blundering their wavering course through the undergrowth at daybreak, and without recriminations all go home together. When he returns to the scenes of his childhood, there is the dangerous opportunity for the obligatory romantic set-piece. But the two things which survive from the past are not the lofty emotions: they are the intellectual and the touchingly comic. Through the eighteenth-century characters who decked the countryside with their maxims now so out of date comes the realization that 'lá soif de connaître restera éternelle'. And childhood memories are evoked not through lofty symbols but from the odd bits and pieces dug up by the amateur archaeologist and most of all from a stuffed dog and an ancient parrot who 'me regarda de cet oeil rond, bordé d'une peau chargée de rides, qui fait penser au regard expérimenté des vieillards'. The theme of loss and persistence finds an individual dimension in that live comic glance of ancient and friendly irony.

Then there comes, in the last chapter, the very opposite of a 'bilan de la faillite'. As always, Nerval's method is not to analyse feeling or to sum up explicitly (though one sentence, with a graceful apology, brings home the value of experience, even with its bitterness). What he does is to take a series of tiny details, each of which is deliberately directed to calling up something almost unnoticed from earlier in the story, and through both details and tone to convey the rebirth of all that seemed lost, in a cycle of repetitive and satisfying pattern. It is some years later, and now, time after time, the narrator sets out from Paris for the old country inn, arriving in the evening. In his inn room he finds the 'trumeau au-dessus de la glace'. There is no statement but we must recognize it as that same old-fashioned object which had decked Sylvie's room in childhood and been banished as she grew sophisticated. The odd collection of 'bric-à-brac' recalls that in his own room at the beginning of the story, later given up. He wakes in the morning and sees round the inn window the same flowers that grew round Sylvie's in childhood; looks out over the same countryside with its memories of eighteenth-century thinkers and lovers. Every word contributes not to a sense of failure but to the joy and renewal of a fresh country morning: 'Après avoir rempli mes poumons de l'air si pur, je descends gaiement . . . ' His foster-brother greets him with the familiar nicknames of childhood. Sylvie's children play round the ruins of the castle, the 'tours de brique' recalling the background where he first saw Adrienne; they practise for the archery festival which had been part of his own memories at the beginning and was linked with druidical traditions from a further past. The cycle of repetitive pattern has caught up in the present all that seemed to have disappeared. He and Sylvie read together old tales now out of date. Again the tone mixes loveliness with gentle mockery: he and Sylvie are part of a permanent human experience but one that will not take itself melodramatically: 'Je l'appelle quelquefois Lolotte et elle me trouve un peu de ressemblance avec Werther, moins les pistolets, qui ne sont plus de mode.' Nostalgia and mockery have achieved a gentle reconciliation with the world as it is, and out of the elusive, the fallacious, the fragmentary or the lost, has come, as in the Chimères, the persistent ritual of human traditions.

Again form as well as theme deliberately evokes a play of opposites, a setting of the elusive and the chaotic against the patterned and the permanent. Memories apparently evoked at random are in fact grouped round a meticulous time-sequence and complex echoes of detail. There is a deliberate sense of inconsequentiality: events which would normally be prepared, stressed and led up to seem to flicker past almost unimportantly; then there come the sudden transformation scenes where we stand outside time and the characters become exemplars: a hushed circle listens to Adrienne singing and 'nous pensions être au Paradis'; or the boy and girl stand dressed up in the old weddingclothes: 'Nous étions l'époux et l'épous pour tout un beau matin d'été.'

The whole story has of course created the palimpsest of the past beneath the present. To pick out the extraordinary tissue of allusions to different ages is to make it sound an artificial and strange amalgam: Herculaneum, the Queen of Trebizond, Apuleius, Dante, the neo-platonists and the druids, Virgil and Rousseau, the Tiburtine Sybil and the Song of Solomon, the Carolingian, Valois and Medici monarchs—but all are intimately and relevantly evoked by a fresh and real countryside and a personal experience. If the air of the story is given to the elusive and the fugitive, the accompaniment constantly and irresistibly suggests a timeless world where the present catches up the echoes of the past.

Sylvie obviously takes on a new richness when the reader knows Nerval's other works and Nerval's reading. The theme of the 'double' (here the foster-brother) has all kinds of undertones. Nerval has worked fascinating coincidences between themes suggested by works and authors as startlingly different as the Pastor Fido and Rétif de la Bretonne, the Roman Comique, the Songe de Poliphile and Wilhelm Meister. To recognize them is to be brought back once again to the coincidence of experience across the ages, the weaving of parallel patterns out of disparate elements.

There is one particular tone that I should suggest is distinctively nervalian in the world of Sylvie. What he has specially picked out from the past are those traditions that stand outside the accepted line of greatness. Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire had talked of how all the 'great' subjects had already been monopolized, and how beauty must now be drawn from the prosaic, the horrible or the bizarre. Nerval quietly turns to more neglected material. The themes he takes up have stood outside the margin of the great tradition for two opposite reasons: some because they were too mannered and artificial, others for their naivety, simplicity and halting clumsiness. From the outmoded and the neglected Nerval brings a gentle mockery at whatever is odd or stiff or strange, and a sense of the permanent human value so particular in its loveliness and its oddity. So he consciously chooses the note of the Gessner pastoral, the ancient idyll, or the country-side of the pre-romantics with its elaborately natural parks and its deliberately constructed ruins, its sentimental moral maxims carved on temples and trees, its delightful conventionalizing of the ceremonies of antiquity in the stylized engravings of the Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis, and all its delicate formality: 'les traces fugitives d'une époque où le naturel était affecté.' And on the other hand the folk-songs attract him because they are limping and irregular, sung by young voices haltingly imitating the quavers of old age. Elsewhere he loves them because they are 'ces mélodies d'un style suranné', and even 'des airs anciens d'un mauvais goût sublime'.

Loveliness is evoked through the suranné and what is outside accepted taste, and is the more penetrating for that. Aurélie shines out from a second-rate play, in a dowdy theatre; Adrienne enchants as a mechanically propelled angel with a cardboard halo; Sylvie dressed up as a bride is all the more charming for the outmoded sleeves, the material yellowed with age, the faded ribbons and tinsel, the 'deux éventails de nacre un peu cassés', and the whole gentle air of the ridiculous of a Greuze village wedding. In the background of this scene stand the portraits of the old aunt and her husband, perhaps the most nervalian touch of all. No great paintings: the local artist has done his doubtful best in the charming and half-ridiculous conventions of his day, with their mixed stiffness and grace; but through this laborious and well-meant art, and the necessary pose with the obligatory bird on curved finger, there shines the personality of the gay mischievous girl, now a bent old woman, beside the self-consciously pinkand-white martial air of her husband the gamekeeper, and the two come alive again in the boy and girl who borrow their clothes, while the naive, halting country songs the old aunt remembers from her pompous village wedding seem to go back to the tradition of the Song of Solomon. From both the limpingly natural and the elaborately formalized Nerval weaves his sense of tenderness, irony and final persistence.

Nerval wrote of Goethe, 'Le génie n'aperçoit pas un chaos sans qu'il lui prenne envie d'en faire un monde.' The world he himself creates exercises a hallucinatory fascination as the reader moves further into the intertwining suggestions of age-long traditions, whether familiar or strange. The present article has deliberately concentrated on one or two simple points. The reader who has once been captured by Nerval will sooner or later find himself both deeply grateful for the recent research which has made possible the understanding of so many details, and impelled, deliberately or instinctively, to look further at the allusions that have not yet been elucidated.