SOURCE: "Angelique" and "Sylvie," in Gérard de Nerval: The Mystic's Dilemma, University of Alabama Press, 1980, pp. 203-11; 211-25

[In the following excerpt, Knapp interprets the myths that Nerval created in Angelique and Sylvie, relating them to Nerval's own psychological states.]

Love that moves the sun and the other stars . . .

Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradise.

The Daughters of Fire,¹ a remarkable work, includes a veritable metaphysics of fire, which takes on mythical and philosophical ramifications. The heroines of the tales in this volume—Angélique, Sylvie, Octavie, Isis, Corilla, Emilie—are all fire spirits, descendants of "that cursed race."

Fire is associated with solar symbolism and heroes: Helios or Phoebus Apollo; the worshippers of Mithra who looked upon the Sun as a conqueror: Sol Invictus. Because of the sun's daily rise and fall, it came to represent death and resurrection of the hero—the eternal repetition of life. The sun is a heroic force, synonymous with vital heat, creative energy, and a guide to man in his daily ventures. Heraclitus considered it a "mediator" between the created and the uncreated.² Its energy (both spiritual and animal) makes it a catalyzing force capable of "transmuting" people and things, melting metals and chemicals. Paracelsus drew an analogy between fire and life, both of them elements being necessary for growth and production.

Being so powerful and aggressive, and an illuminating principle connected with intelligence, the sun has been endowed with masculine qualities. Its positive attributes include growth, fecundation, vital heat, and the like. But it can also burn, blind, scorch, and cause sterility. Empedocles felt this dichotomy so acutely that he could no longer bear the conflict and threw himself into Mt. Etna.

For Nerval, fire meant heroism and suffering. Prometheus, Cain, Adoniram, Tubal-Cain—all had helped mankind bring in new attitudes, and all, therefore, had been compelled to suffer the fate of the hero who acts against the status quo, against God. Such creative types are so blinded by the fire within them that they overlook the dangers involved in accomplishing their goals; they are determined to brave the rigid circumscribed world. But in so doing, they earn the wrath of the forces they seek to annihilate and are tormented. Their reward, if any, will come to them only in some remote future.

The suffering heroes with whom Nerval identified may be looked upon as fallen angels. Eblis, according to Mohammedan tradition, represents evil; he is a fallen angel who refused to adore Adam as God had commanded. Eblis argued that since he and his friends had been formed from fire and not from a lesser material, earth, as Adam was, they would not be subservient to him. The Persian poet Esfahani expressed the idea as follows: "Fire, which is the origin of nature and of Ibba's pride, will be the instrument of his punishment."³

Prometheus, Cain, Tubal-Cain, Adoniram, Sheba, Eblis, Lucifer⁴—all belonged to the "red race" and were doomed to eternal martyrdom for having been "light bringers"—for having refused to adhere to certain fixed and immutable laws promulgated by God in his attempt, they believed, to enslave man.

The Illuminists, such as Martinès de Pasqually, had written at length about these fire beings, that is, those responsible for the discovery of the molten metals that saved man from virtual annihilation after the flood. Romantic poets such as Byron, de Vigny, and Hugo identified with Cain and Prometheus and viewed themselves as Messiah types, as inventors of new literary credoes and techniques—and as victims of society's callous attitudes. Nerval, more than the others, bore the mark of Cain because his suffering had been more intense than theirs: he had been incarcerated and they had not; he had not won the admiration nor achieved their popularity. Nerval, like Cain, was prepared to endure his agony. He was truly of the "red race," and to prove his lineage he merely had to point to his name: "Labrunie," which means "the one who seizes thunder," and the word "brunnir, "brennen," to burn, indicating the presence of the dynamic fire principle.⁵

Angélique

Nerval chose the name Angélique for the heroine of his story very deliberately.⁶ The semidivine "angels," composed of fire, water, or both, and "divinely harmonized," were looked upon as agents capable of encompassing both celestial and earthly spheres—messengers (as the word "angelos" in Greek and "malakh," the Hebrew word, indicate). Angels are of all types: destroyers (II Samuel, 24, 16); interpreters of God's message (Job, 32, 23), protectors as in Exodus, prognosticators as described in the Gospels. Angels may assume any form, according to their particular function.⁷

Angélique is a messenger, the harbinger of a new way. Like her illustrious predecessors, the fire-people, she braves conventions and, because of her rebellious spirit, must suffer the punishment meted out to transgressors. Because she is pure in heart and irreproachably honest, Angélique may be used by the others to their advantage—bringing destruction both upon herself and those surrounding her.

Nerval's Angélique is a quest, an Odyssey with mythic grandeur. It is a search for the treasure hard to attain—a symbolical expression of an inner drama, a numinous or sacred experience. Nerval may have chosen the mythic form because, in a sense, it "takes" man back to past times, which then become part of present reality. Fabulous and miraculous adventures may be integrated into the world of actuality. The teller of the myth divests himself of chronological time and lives in a "transfigured" realm, surrounded by supernatural beings or peoples. Myths may also "solidify" beliefs previously considered incredible, or they may justify new situations.⁸

Nerval declared in his preface that he had "seized the series of all of his anterior existences"; that "it was no more difficult for me to consider myself to have been Angélique a prince, a king, a magus, a genie and even God."⁹ might thus be the vehicle that permitted him to fuse a mythological and limitless past with his mortal existence. In so doing, he became part of an eternal life cycle.

Because a myth narrates an original or religious experience—because, that is, it "relates back to the past" or to some nebulous precognitive realm—Nerval could use such a literary device as a stepping-stone toward the discovery of what he considered to be his own fabulous origins. Was he not the descendant of Nerva? Was his secret name not Roma?

A longing to establish oneself in some time long past reveals an intense dissatisfaction with present conditions. Yet a return (or a regression) into a spaceless and timeless mythical past may constellate new ideas and principles, and may even pave the way for a new orientation if such a retreat is fully understood. Nerval's regressus ad uterum, as delineated in Angélique, so autobiographical a tale, may be looked upon as a symptom of his urgent need to reimmerse himself in the "waters of life," in the "earth's womb," and so to free himself from guilt and sin.

Nerval's myth takes us on a quest for a book. He is looking for a volume that describes the exploits of a historical figure, the abbé Bucquoy. He first explores the libraries in Frankfurt and then pursues his labors in the libraries and book shops of Paris and the Valois region. Clues appear in each episode; digressions and asides associated with the abbé are inserted at regular intervals, enlarging the story's dimensions. Finally, Nerval discovers a volume in the Compiègne library describing the life of one Angélique de Longueval, the abbé's grandaunt, and he sets out for Paris coincidentally on the day that this town commemorates the dead. Nerval looks upon this solemn occasion with awe, and upon his walk with the village folk as a pilgrimage in respect to the memory of Angélique, whose life he now begins to narrate.

Myths are filled with special objects, even sacred ones—hierophanies, that their heroes are forever retrieving either from the hands of enemies or from loss: the Chalice in the Grail Legend, the word that must be recovered in Masonic mysteries, the philosopher's stone in alchemy. The volume relating the life of the abbé Bucquoy is a hierophany; it enables Nerval to make forays into the past, to revive a world long since dead—and to write a work of art.

Secrecy is usually attendant upon a quest. As Goethe wrote: "A very deep meaning lies in that notion, that a man in search of buried treasure must work in utter silence; [that he] must speak not a word, whatever appearance, either terrific or delightful, may present itself."¹⁰ For philosophical reasons, Nerval made present excellent use of secrecy in his narration, but secrecy also served to enhance the literary values, to intensify the suspense, and to increase the pace and excitement of his tale.

Nerval's quest begins in a world he knows well: the cerebral realm of the library, the written world—specifically, the Arsenal in Paris, with all its wonderful memories for Nerval. This had been the home of one of the finest story tellers of them all, Charles Nodier, and here Nerval had often met his friends Gautier, Balzac, Dumas, Lamartine, Musset, and others. Now, like so many phantoms from the past, these figures would intrude upon his present: in Angélique, each time Nerval describes a library he visits, or its entourage, he associates his friends with historical or literary figures, linking specific incidents to objective situations—and thus making use of another myth-making device.

Nerval surely identified with Angélique, the daughter of a wealthy nobleman. Her character coincided with his in so many ways. She was angelic, pure in heart, a victim of injustice; she was also a dreamer who dwelled in another world, frequently in the dominion of death.

Ever since the age of thirteen, Angélique de Longueval, whose character was sad and dreamy, neither enjoyed, as she said, costly precious stones, beautiful tapestries, nor beautiful clothes; she aspired only for death to cure her spirit.¹¹

As the story progresses, Nerval's identification grows more intense. When he tells of the love the young man bore for Angélique (and who because of his passion had been so cruelly murdered by her father's orders), he talks of the excoriating pain experienced by the one left behind: "The tearing apart which she experienced with this death revealed her love."¹² Angélique first knew love in relation to a loss.¹³ Before his death she had been unaware of the meaning of affection and, like Adam and Eve, had been living in a paradisiac state; after his demise, which we may equate with Adam and Eve's fall into matter, she began her worldly existence.

The letter Angélique's suitor wrote her before being killed was premonitory—a warning such as that found in many myths. He described his passion for her in terms of contrasting colors: dawn, light, circle of darkness, shadow—always underscoring an essential duality, the great separation in store for them. The color symbolism also implied that he would be the victim of some overpowering force—some black and evil principle—that would make him incapable of breaking out of the circle of doom into the clarity of celestial spheres. Other dichotomies are also implicit in the letter: the impact of a spiritual and ethereal love based on illumination (golden hues) and the dark forces of his instinctual self (the more sombre and lugubrious tonalities).¹⁴

Angélique, like Nerval, associated her love with death. Unlike Nerval, after two years of mourning, she found a substitute to "take the place of this eternally dead being."¹⁵ Another young man in her father's employ, La Corbinière, develops a passion for her. After innumerable trysts, Angélique flees with him, but not without taking some of her parents' silverware to ensure their immediate financial security. The couple goes to Italy, where La Corbinière joins the army, on to Germany, and then back to Italy. In the course of all this, La Corbinière begins leading a dissolute life. The silverware money is soon spent and both he and Angélique are reduced to penury. After much suffering, he dies. Angélique returns to France to live out her life in solitude and poverty.

Some authors, Nerval wrote, "cannot invent without identifying with their imaginary characters" to such an extent that their lives are sometimes fashioned upon one's own; their "ambitions" and "loves" become the author's.¹⁶ The same can be said of Nerval in his Angélique tale—not the actual events that were experienced, but the manner in which they were lived, and the make-up of the protagonist's personality and temperament.

More important, perhaps, were the autobiographical events that Nerval wove into this subjective tale. To commemorate the pain that Angélique had experienced during her lifetime (and, by association, Nerval's own pain), he set out on a pilgrimage, together with the people on the day reserved to commemorate the dead. As he began, he felt as if he were entering consecrated territory, penetrating a mystery, a secret rite de passage. Each person, tree, lake, house, event, the scenery itself, took on a mystical aura and was transformed into a series of hierophanies.¹⁷

Pilgrimages link one's own past with that of another. Both Nerval and Angélique would be merged in the fluidity of time, and Nerval would succeed in abolishing the present temporal reality.

To enter an atemporal (or mythological) realm is to lose one's own individuality, at least temporarily. Such a journey can be accomplished through a double-memory technique (objective and subjective), which Nerval uses with felicity. The objective memory, when recounting Angélique's life, is used to recall or examine specific historical dates and personal reminiscences. The subjective memory filters through the subliminal realms, recreating anterior existences and, concomitantly, the feelings, sensations, and ideations appropriate to the eras involved. To be capable of reentering the past, as Nerval had done in this tale, is to master a formidable weapon. It gives one the ability to reshape one's life, divest oneself of the negative Karma that had predominated until this moment.¹⁸ Nerval had always felt himself to be the victim of some negative astral or divine force that was bent upon destroying him, and he longed, therefore, to reenter time and to recast his life.

Nerval's return to the past via the double-memory technique required a sacrifice: the loss of his identity. According to Plato, waters from the fountain of Lethe were given to each person before he was reborn and returned to earth. Proper use of one's memory implies the recollection of ideas that have been forgotten-—of transpersonal and eternal truths that were lost through "forgetfulness" before one's birth.¹⁹ One's subjective memory was designed to restore, as best it could, the experiences of past existences that had been washed away before one's "return" to earth. To discover one's past, Plato intimated, was to experience one's previous life. Accordingly, Nerval questioned the meaning of "imagination" at the very outset of his story. "To invent, really is to remember," Nerval wrote, quoting both Plato and Pythagoras.

Nerval achieved his goal. He recaptured the use of his subjective memory when walking through the melancholy autumnal landscape, which he continually personified and termed "the most beautiful and the saddest."²⁰ He was again in the land of his ancestors. In this almost transparent atmosphere of foggy climes, reddish hues, and denuded trees, which he compared to the colors that the Flemish painters splashed onto their canvases, he felt a certain reverie. Through his return to the past, to his ancestors, he gathered new strength. "I feel strengthened on this maternal soil."²¹

Through Angélique Nerval was able to create a veritable cult out of reverie or souvenir.

Whatever one may have to say philosophically speaking, we are bound to the earth by many bonds. One does not carry the ashes of one's ancestors on the soles of one's shoes, and the poorest guardian recalls a sacred souvenir which brings to mind those who loved him. Religion or philosophy, everything proves to man the importance of the eternal cult of souvenir.²²

As Nerval walked further into the country, other associations came to mind with an ever-increasing circular effect. The countryside echoed the Watteau painting The Embarkation for Cythera, with its fragile delineations, its medley of delicate harmonies. As peasants came into view, Nerval stopped and listened to their chatter. He was receptive to the musicality of their language, their rhythms and intonations. They spoke, he observed, as their ancestors had spoken centuries earlier. Their language had remained untouched by outside influences and each word was uncontaminated and "rose to heaven as does the song of a skylark."²³ It was as if time had stopped and Nerval were entering still further the remote regions of the myth.

It is no wonder that Nerval was moved by this visual and aural spectacle. Scholars such as Richer have pointed out that Angélique was constructed in the manner of a concerto with its prelude, its main and secondary themes, each winding in and out of the piece, a first movement.²⁴ Nerval had always loved ancient ballads, the lyrical stanzas that the bards and troubadours of France had sung in medieval times and during the Renaissance—songs commemorating a variety of occasions: a wife complaining of her husband's infidelities, a beautiful shepherdess fending off a nobleman, a nun lamenting her vocation, a knight riding to meet his lady love—political songs, weaving songs, satirical verse.²⁵ Nerval knew the songs of William songs, of Poitiers (1071-1127), Jaufre Rudel (1147), Bernard de Ventadour (1150-1170). He had made a study of certain songs of the Valois region, which he published in magazines and included in The Daughters of Fire.

Music not only had a hypnotic effect upon Nerval, but acted as a stimulant to his subjective memory. When he listened to the peasant boys and girls singing their village songs, sections of his past were reintegrated into the present; "a melody with which I had been cradled" emerged before him.²⁶ More than ever, he realized how precious his childhood had been—the few days spent with his Uncle Boucher at Mortefontaine before his father had intruded upon his existence and taken him back to Paris. And there were the wonderful but all-too-short summer vacations. Now, all those he had loved were dead—as was his youth. "The souvenirs of childhood revivify when one has reached the half-way mark in life. It's like a palimpsest the lines of which one is able to bring to view with certain chemical procedures."²⁷

The visual image came into sharper focus now. Nerval saw the little peasant girls dancing about so merrily and it was as if he were witnessing a magical ritual—like Shiva creating the world through his dancing; like some divine spirits emanating from the world beyond. The girls were like hieroglyphics weaving arabesques in outer space. They became potent factors in his mind—constellating sacred powers, forces that succeeded in conjuring up time past. They were no longer individual little girls, but had taken on mythical proportions; they had been depersonalized, transformed into archetypal figures.

Like Angélique these maidens must have been made of both water and fire—they too had the power of angels, of restoring chunks of past life into present reality. Their dance, like those of the Greek girls Nerval had seen on one of his trips, took on circular patterns, created serpentine effects, encouraged a hypnotic reverie—enabling him to wander still further back into the past.²⁸

Nerval's associations grew firmer, more detailed. They centered around a mystery play he had seen as a child. He recalled a particular scene: Christ's descent into hell. A beautiful blond girl had starred in the play. She was dressed in white, with pearls interwoven in her hair, a nimbus surrounding her head; she held a golden sword.²⁹

Nerval's objective memory had aroused his subjective faculty of recall by moving from the immediate object (the young girls) to an incident he had experienced before (the mystery play). In unifying these dual memory functions, he encouraged an even more remote past to emerge; the historical time in which the medieval mystery play had been written and Chirst's era.³⁰ To these two epochs was added the image of the ideal female principle: the blond girl dressed in white, associated with the Virgin Mary or with Sophia (the representative of divine wisdom).

Christ's descent into hell is of particular interest in these scenes as it may be equated with two other journeys into the underworld: that of Orpheus when he tried to claim his beautiful Eurydice, and that of Osiris when he retired to the underworld after his dismemberment.

By associating Christ and Orpheus (and Osiris) with his own descent into the past, Nerval was in effect experiencing an imitatio dei, a desire to return to the primordial unity, the center of the "Earth's Umbilicus," the self or the beginning. To reenter the axis mundi, where opposites no longer exist, a timeless and spaceless area, is to identify with the eternal and universal principle—with God. Aristotle called this central point that of the "unmoved mover" because it is at the center that creation starts and extends outward, frequently in circular fashion. In most mythologies, the cardinal points emerge or are born from the center. (In many cathedrals and temples, the altars are placed in the center.) Nerval's desire to reach the focal point, the center of his problem, indicates an obsessive desire to relive his life. To experience the center necessitates a rite de passage that enables the initiate to go from the transitory to the eternal, from the profane to the sacred, from life to death.

Nerval's fusion with his personal (subjective reminiscences) and collective (historical, Angélique) past, using the Abbé Bucquoy as the vehicle for his quest, lends further credence to his own need to escape from his present condition, to his desire to regress into some past existence or anterior world.

Angélique has been considered Nerval's double. She slipped through life from misfortune to misfortune, always buoyed by her dreams and reveries. While she represents the negative, shadowy side of Nerval, the little girls with their freshness, vigor and spontaneity, stand for his positive attributes. They also represent the collective image of life as it bursts into song and dance—as it burgeons each spring and fecundates the earth, when all avenues are open, all possibilities still available.

Angélique, an archetypal image, represents a fire principle—that of the young girl who loves too naively, too blindly, and whose life is consumed by these very forces. Because she lacked wisdom and insight—that burning force within her, which scorched rather than illuminated—she was forced to suffer and live in exile until her husband's death, and then in penury in her own land. Yet, because of the beauty of her passion, she succeeded in living life thoroughly, fully, totally, not as a superficial joyride but as a rite de passage, enabling her eventually to earn rebirth in another domain—that of the myth.

He is not disquieted by the moon that he sees every night, till it comes bodily to him, sleeping or waking, draws near and charms him with silent movements, or fascinates him with the evil or sweetness of its touch. He does not retain from this the visual representation, say, of the wandering orb of light, or of a demonic being that somehow belongs to it, but at first he has in him only the dynamic, stirring image of the moon's effect, streaming through his body. Out of this the image of the moon personally achieving the effect only gradually emerges. Only now, that is to say, does the memory of the unknown that is nightly taken into his being begin to kindle and take shape as the doer and bringer of the effect. Thus it makes possible the transformation of the unknown into an object, a He or a She out of a Thou that could not originally be experienced, but simply suffered.

Martin Buber, I and Thou.

Sylvie, one of the most exquisite prose works in French literature, is considered by men of letters a superb example of French "clarity of expression." Paradoxically, it was written at a time when Nerval was a victim of schizophrenia.¹ Its language is limpid, musical, and delicate; its images, which serve to delineate individual protagonists and situate events, also encourage Nerval's optical meanderings, which frequently take on circular or cyclical contours.

Sylvie is a myth because the experiences revealed in it are both personal (they depict events experienced by Nerval during the walking trips he had been permitted to take to the Valois region while in and out of rest homes) and transcendental because they are associated with events and people in his own "fabulous" and remote past—when he was a child in Ermenonville, Loisy, Châalis, and Senlis. In the early years of primitive times, life seemed beautiful and was filled with infinite possibilities; each time he returned to it—either through the dream or reveries—he felt refreshed, renewed, cleansed. It was as if he had undergone a baptism, a purification ceremony.

Because the narrator felt reborn with each foray into the past—particularly the early ones—Sylvie may be looked upon as a creation myth. When dwelling upon his youth, he experienced an obliteration of chronological time and a resurgence of cyclical or sacred time. Past events became contemporaneous, lending a sense of eternity to the narrative. The entire scene assumes extratemporal dimensions, since it is no longer subject to the ravages of chronological time. The protagonists who make up the narrator's world, endowed with almost prehuman or superhuman personality traits, assume mythical grandeur and enjoy divine powers: the ability to appear and disappear in the story, as had the goddesses of old. Because they are such fleeting forces, they remain mysterious, evanescent, intangible, and abstract. Their power over the narrator is immeasurable.

At the outset of the tale, the narrator lives in Paris and goes to the theatre nightly to admire from afar his beloved stage star Aurélie, whom he has not yet met. One evening, after a performance, the narrator thumbs through a newspaper and notices an article concerning a celebration to be held at Loisy, a district not far from Paris where he had spent his childhood. A whole series of impressions invades his conscious mind: his entire life passes in review before him. The creation myth takes root as he plunges back to the past: he is a young lad at Loisy and in love with Sylvie, a beautiful country girl with black eyes, regular features, and a most ingratiating and outgoing personality. He sees himself dancing a round on a beautiful lawn in front of a castle dating from the time of Henri IV of France. The rules of the dance oblige him to kiss Adrienne, the girl who finds herself in the inner circle with him. As her "golden hair brushed against his cheek,"² he is overcome with feelings of a "strange uneasiness." He listens to Adrienne sing an old French romance, then places a crown of laurel leaves on her head and kisses her, while Sylvie's eyes brim with tears.

Some years later, the narrator returns to Loisy for the celebration of another national holiday. He renews his friendship with Sylvie and with her brother, and learns that Adrienne has become a nun. As they walk in the woods, chatting and reminiscing, they experience a revival of times past.

On another occasion, the narrator and Sylvie visit her Aunt Othys. They disguise themselves (as children often do) in the aunt's wedding dress and her husband's uniform—a visualization of their unconscious desires.

Now older, the narrator experiences conflicting sensations. He ponders his relationship with Sylvie. She is good for him, he reasons; she represents earthiness, health, and life. But he cannot forget that celestial vision of Adrienne, which returns to haunt him. Nor can he obliterate the image of Aurélie, the actress. The three female images blur in his mind, and he wishes desperately that they were one. Conflict and indecisiveness have entered his life. He is no longer living in a carefree child's world—in an Eden-like paradise.

In Paris, he meets Aurélie, writes a play for her, then tours with her and her troupe in the Valois region. When he tells her of his feelings for Adrienne, she realizes that he is not in love with her. She marries the manager of her troupe, who offers her love with a workable relationship. When the narrator sees Sylvie again he knows now that for her own well-being she must live in the world of reality, even though he cannot. She marries a hard-working young man, Le Grand Frisé. The narrator learns that Adrienne had died many years earlier, in 1832, when in the convent.

The narrator, who had attempted to recreate himself by returning to his origins, is aware of his failure to achieve his goal, but he cannot adjust to the world of reality in which he is forced to live. He opts for escape in travel.

The three female protagonists around whom Nerval's tale focuses—Aurélie, Sylvie, and Adrienne—are all archetypal figures, aspects of the Eternal Feminine or the Great Mother. The narrator's goal is to unify what is divided, to create one person out of the three, to incorporate the characteristics and qualities of each in the others, thus creating a complete or total being who for him represents the ideal.

If such a coniunctio were possible, the narrator could render the infinite finite, the abstract concrete. In his perpetual attempt to create unity, he is bringing forth a prismatic world, forever seeing aspects of Adrienne in Sylvie, Adrienne in Aurélie, differentiating still further what he seeks to bind together. Only in a state of reverie or dream can he reshuffle his emotions and coalesce the three women.

Aurélie, Sylvie, and Adrienne—three deities—are not fecundating forces for the narrator because he experiences their powers as an observer: he is a sterile receiver, not an activator. The forces these deities arouse within his psyche serve only to stir his feelings, but never sufficiently to make him act overtly; so he slips in and out of their lives as he does his own reverie. Nothing has changed in his situation—except that at the end he realizes the impossibility of changing three into one and thus of changing his own life's course.

Because the three female figures are archetypal they take on eternal significance—enter the realm of the divine. Aurélie, Adrienne, and Sylvie are representatives of the triunal aspects of the Magna Mater as viewed in Venus in her celestial, terrestrial and infernal manifestations; in the Moon goddess called Selene during the full moon; Artemis with the waxing moon and Hecate when the moon is dark; in the Virgin Mary as saint (the mother of Christ), in her earthly guise as the mother of the other children she had by Joseph; as sinner in Mary the Harlot.

1. Aurélie

Venus (Infernal): Hecate (Dark Moon): Mary the Harlot (Sinner)

Because Aurélie is an actress and represents the world of illusion, which glows only when artificially lit, she stands for Venus in her infernal aspects. Like Venus, she has the power to lure men to her fold, to compel them to fall victim to her power, to incorporate them into her since she is a deity, a transpersonal force. She is an infernal Venus such as had been worshipped in ancient Assyria and Babylonia: goddesses of sensual love and immorality. In Eastern lands such women became sacred prostitutes, consecrating their bodies to the earthly representatives of certain deities.³

The narrator is obsessed with his vision of Aurélie and "indifferent" to everything except for this "one well known apparition which illuminated the empty space, infused life with one breath and one word, into those faces which surrounded me."⁴ She embodies his ideal and because she injects life into him, he believes her to be a creative force in his life. In reality, he responds passively to her—as a votary before a goddess. He worships her from afar.

I felt myself living in her and she lived for me alone. Her smile filled me with infinite beatitude; the vibration of her voice, so tender and yet whose timber was strong, made me shudder with joy and love. She possessed, for me, all the perfections, she answered all my bursts of enthusiasm, all my caprices, beautiful like the day when illuminated by the stage lights which shone on her from below, pale like the night, when the stage lights were dimmed, letting the rays from the chandelier above shine on her, showing her in a more natural manner, glittering in the shadow from her beauty alone, like the Divine Hours, with a star on their forehead, sculptured on the brown background of the frescoes at Herculaneum!⁵

The Divine Hours to which Nerval referred were goddesses, in the service of Venus, representing time: years, hours, minutes, seconds—all united and linking all generations together. By associating Aurélie with these Divine Hours, he infuses her with an eternal quality (cyclical time) and since they are in Venus' employ, with love. By adding the city of Herculaneum to the image, he gives historical credence to what was merely a fantasy before and, by the same token, endows Aurélie with a real, ideal, and eternal existence—thereby fixing time. But Herculaneum has its negative side. It was destroyed by volcanic eruption—and the narrator's vision of perfection in Aurélie could also be shattered. To prevent such an outcome, he refrains from approaching her, and signs the notes he hides in the bouquets he sends her, "from a stranger."

Ideals—such as his vision of Aurélie—cannot remain potent forces in terrestrial relationships; they cannot be nurtured on earthly contact. Since Nerval's ideals are anima figures, they feed in unconscious and dark realms; the light of consciousness causes them to vanish, to shrivel: "It's an image that I am pursuing, nothing more."⁶ The narrator stays aloof. He avoids coming into contact with Aurélie, rationalizing "that actresses were not women," that "nature had forgotten to give them a heart," that they were cold, elusive, beautiful, unfeeling, hypnotic in their ways. Unconsciously, he must feel that familiarity breeds contempt.

Love, alas! vague forms, rose and blue hues, metaphysical phantoms! Seen from close, the real woman would revolt our ingenuity; she had to appear as queen or goddess, and under no circumstances should one approach her.⁷

To contact Aurélie would be to demythify her by humanizing her. Distance is essential for worship. Perfection incarnate exists only as an abstraction, a creation of the mind; it can be kept alive only when experienced in some remote realm—illuminated on stage by an artificial light, functioning as an illusion, wearing a mask. Yet the fear of losing or destroying the image he has of her comes into sharper focus: "I was afraid of troubling the magic mirror which reflected her image."⁸ To stare as he had at Aurélie or at a "magic mirror" (or any mirror at all) is to become narcissistic, and this limits any kind of development and leads to death. Gazing into one's own reflection is comparable to an incarceration; it is a fixing, immobilizing agent. If his idealization of Aurélie is not in some way altered, it will not only remain unproductive but will become an agent of self-destruction.

Because of the way Aurélie is illuminated on stage and comes to life only at night in the creation of a world of illusion, she is comparable to the moon goddess Hecate in her blackened phase.

By worshipping the moon, as the narrator does through Aurélie, he is returning to a matriarchal social structure, to even more remote periods in the world, antedating patriarchal sun worship. The "unseen powers of the spirit world," as manifested in the moon's "mysterious qualities," held the narrator spellbound, lulled him into unconsciousness and perhaps even death.⁹ So long as he remained in the theatre, he stated, he was happy; the minute he left and his image vanished, he was invaded with melancholy, "the bitter sadness which remains after the disappearance of a dream."¹⁰

Only at night, in the darkened realms, did the narrator come to life. The Hecate aspect of the night deity, the goddess of the darkened moon who reigned over the lower world, tantalizes the narrator. In ancient times she was worshipped as a goddess of ghosts and magic; she haunted crossways and graves, accompanied the dogs of the Styx and the shadow of departed specters. Aurélie, in her "glorious" and "terrible" aspects—her "nonhuman" way of life—mesmerized the narrator,¹¹ and engendered beauty, mystery, and excitement his psyche.

Because she is a representative of infernal love, the passion she inspires is dark, Hecate-like, mysterious, frightening, and perhaps even fatal. Like Hecate, Aurélie causes confusion, chaos.¹² The epithet phosphorous has been associated with Hecate, who is frequently pictured as carrying a torch. She is a "light bringer," not of purification but of consciousness.¹³

The light illuminating her on stage brings out her sensuality, her volatile nature; it shimmers, underlining an erotic and passionate side. In this respect, Aurélie may be likened to Mary the Harlot (or Mary the Egyptian) before her redemption.

Mary the Harlot represented the infernal side of this triunal figure, the debauched individual who remained so until her conversion. This "infernal" Mary prostituted her way to the Holy Land, and then lived as an anchorite in the desert. Along with Mary Magdalene, this infernal Virgin is frequently depicted in sculptures and paintings as black. In Einsiedeln, Switzerland, the black Virgin "stands on the moon" and works miracles for cripples and invalids. In Chartres, the statue of the Black Virgin bears a dark face. At Notre Dame de la Recourance (Orléans), the statue of the Black Virgin, highly prized, is supposed to possess great powers.¹⁴ Aurélie also shines "in the shadow of her beauty alone"—and returns to darkness, as does the moon, when not lighted by some external force.

When the narrator listens to her recite Schiller's verses, he is enraptured by the "sublime" manner in which she brings them to life. He sends her a note, then leaves for Germany. He wants this image to remain with him eternally: "That's something fixed for the future." To alter his relationship with her would be to personalize it and to bring it down to earth, to debase his love by putting her on a footing with other "vulgar ones."¹⁵

When the narrator returns to Paris, she agrees to act in his play; then he goes on tour with Aurélie and her troupe, and the ideals begin to slip as the world of reality takes possession of him. The narrator invites her to lunch at the castle of the "white queen," and as she rides over the fields in her riding habit, her blond hair floats in the wind, reminding him of "a queen of yesteryear," a goddess. Even the peasants stop, astounded, and look at her. He takes her to the place where he had first seen Adrienne, and tells her of his love for this beautiful girl. Aurélie understands, and says, "You don't love me! You are waiting for me to tell you that the actress is the same person as the nun; you are searching for a drama and the ending escapes you . . ."¹⁶ Dismayed, he questions: Then it wasn't love after all?"

The illusion has vanished. The attempted fusion of Aurélie (the symbol of all that is infernal, dark, and sinful) and Adrienne (the world of the spirit) cannot take place in the domain of reality. Now Aurélie flows out of narrator's life back to some remote past, some fabulous era—a fantasmagoria.

2. Adrienne

Venus (Celestial), Moon Goddess Selene (Full Moon), Virgin Mary (Saint)

Adrienne is the most elusive and haunting figure in Sylvie. She may be linked to Venus in her celestial aspects and called "the Heavenly" one who represented pure and idealistic love. Many temples to honor her were built on mountains and citadels in Greece and Asia Minor. As a goddess and celestial figure, she inspired mystery and awe, which rendered her even more captivating than Aurélie with whom he could come into contact at will.

Adrienne is first described dancing around with the little girls from the ancient province of Valois. The reddened stone façade, the pointed slate-covered roof, the varied carvings on the castle that stood at the far side of the lawn—all injected an outer-worldly atmosphere onto the scene. Adrienne began singing as "the setting sun pierced through the leaves with its flaming rays" and he heard an ancient French romance which filled him with "melancholia and love."¹⁷

The coloring and hues used by Nerval to describe Adrienne attest to her spirituality and purity: "heavenly" blends of pastel tones, blond curls, the whiteness of her skin and countenance. All these stand in sharp contrast wih the surrounding tonalities. And because of these hues, she is associated with one of the triunal aspects of the moon goddess, Selene, who was worshipped in East Asia and Syria, as a celestial figure depicted in subdued light. She was a beautiful woman with long wings who wore a golden diadem. When her great love, Endymion, died, Zeus bestowed on him eternal youth, which could only be experienced in a sleeping state. It was believed that Selene came down from the heavens nightly to embrace her beloved in his grotto.

Adrienne also possessed spiritual and reflective qualities. As she began her song, the moon became visible in the distance, its diaphanous and ethereal hues invaded the entire scene, "the shadow descended along the great trees and the moon light thus being born shed itself on her alone, isolated from our circle. . . ." It was as if her "divine" essence were being illuminated, all blending so exquisitely with the beauty of her song, the stillness of the evening, and the intensity of the emotion she had aroused in the narrator. The narrator, believing himself to be "in paradise," kissed Adrienne, as was the custom, and she became a "sacred" object for him.¹⁸

Adrienne was the same type of evanescent human being as the Vestal Virgins of old who performed their religious rituals in natural surroundings, exuding spirituality and implanted in a diaphanous setting: the grass "was covered with condensation which gave off feeble vapors which unrolled their white flakes on the tips of the grass. . . ." It was as if all the elements—the universe united—had come into play in this image: water, fire, earth, air.

As the image comes into sharper focus, Adrienne represents the celestial aspects of the Virgin Mary: the mother of Christ, the heavenly, saintly, immaculate and perfect side of the triunal great mother archetype. She is surrounded with "the shining leaves on her blond hair dazzling when illuminated by the pale rays of the moon. . . ."¹⁹ Like many statues, paintings, and descriptions of the celestial Venus, Selene and the Virgin Mary, Adrienne's face was bathed in an ethereal and spiritual light. A halo encircled her head—not brilliant or brash, but "pale," representing the internal or reflective qualities in a human being. Because of the dreamy atmosphere, the narrator considers her to be semidivine—like Dante's Beatrice—a soul in all of its beauty and purity.

The fusion of Adrienne as a moon deity and as the celestial Virgin Mary is even more apparent when recalling the sculptures in medieval art, when the Virgin Mary was featured "enthroned" on the moon and called by Catholic church fathers "The Moon of the Church, or Moon, the Spiritual Moon, the Perfect and Eternal Moon."²⁰ As Adrienne stood on the lawn signing her ancient romance, the rays of the moon filtered through the surrounding trees and shrubs, lighting up her countenance, infusing it with a mysterious power.

In antiquity the moon goddess, believed to be the "actual fire of the moon," was depicted carrying a torch and wearing a moon crescent. The festival of candles (or torches), celebrated in her honor in pagan times on August 15, was carried into Christian tradition to mark the day the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven, "when the course of her earthly life was run" and she "assumed in body and in soul to heavenly glory." (This belief became doctrine by papal decree in 1950.)

Some years later the narrator returns to Valois region and learns that Adrienne had become a nun. He goes to Châalis, a town with monuments dating from the Renaissance. With Sylvie's brother, he enters an ancient abbey and watches a medieval mystery play that depicts Christ's descent into Hell. Adrienne suddenly appears to him in the role of the Virgin Mary.

A spirit was rising from the abyss, holding a flaming sword in its hand calling the others to come and admire the glory of Christ vanquisher of Hades. This spirit was Adrienne transfigured by her costume, as she already had been by her vocation. The golden colored cardboard nimbus which surrounded her angelic head appeared to us quite naturally a circle of light: her voice had increased in force and in dimension.²¹

After the performance, the narrator and Sylvie's brother go to the guardhouse where they see an ancient coat of arms on the door: a swan with outspread wings.²² The swan, an animal close to the narrator's heart, is known to sing out his beautiful song just before he is to die.²³ An ominous tone seems to be injected into the narrative at this juncture—a premonition of death.

But Adrienne was already dead to him; she had become a nun and departed from the world of the living to enter the realm of God. His image of her singing on the lawn as a young girl had not grown dim; on the contrary, it became more powerful in his mind's eye in an idealized and divine form. Her portrayal of the Virgin Mary seemed, therefore, to corroborate his own inner feelings: she had really entered the world of the divine—as a swan she had eclipsed herself from his life.

The narrator is told only at the end of the tale that Adrienne had died in 1832 at the convent of Saint S. . . .²⁴ Death, however, was not an end to life for the narrator and was considered merely as a temporary change. According to certain ancient sects, including the Pythagoreans, the dead went to the moon for three nights (when the moon was not visible). On the fourth night, when the moon could again be seen, it was believed that the individuals who had departed from the earth had been reborn in light and in joy. Pythagoras spoke of the "Isle of the Blessed," a celestial plane located on the sun, the moon and the Milky Way. Plutarch believed that after death the spirit went to the sun; the body remained in the earth and the soul was purified in the moon. It is understandable that the narrator associated the divine Adrienne with the celestial aspects of the moon.

Throughout the tale the narrator attempted to unify what had been severed, to fuse the celestial and infernal aspects—Adrienne, Aurélie. Aurélie, who held the narrator's attention nightly was a theatrical performer: an entertainer, a seductress, a sinner, a Mary the Harlot type, an incarnation of the sensual Venus (infernal) of the Hecate Moon figure. Men succumbed to this type of woman, to her wiles; Zagreus, Pentheus, Orpheus had all, passively, bowed to her ways.

Yet the memory of the celestial Adrienne invaded his very being—"the flower of night as it emerges, pink and rose phantom slipping onto the green grass hals bathed in white vapors."²⁵ He could think only of her.

Unable to capture what was evanescent, to unite what was divided, the narrator's feelings forever oscillate. Aurélie incorporates his being. "I felt myself live in her."²⁶ Then he recalls Adrienne as she sang, as she entertained, and perhaps, they were one and the same person: saint and sinner. "To love a nun under the guise of an actress. . . . It's enough to drive one insane!"²⁷

Mythologically, the narrator's desire to incorporate the differentiated aspects of the Magna Mater archetype is perfectly valid but can only happen in a nondifferentiated realm—either in the unconscious, in the cosmic pleroma, in death, or in the religious cult. During these moments, each aspect inhabits the other; just as the maiden becomes the future woman and the woman once again the maiden, the two become one. In the Eleusinian mysteries, the initiate celebrated and worshipped Demeter as both girl and woman—and in this very unification the mystery was buried.²⁸ It was neither unusual nor contradictory to unite opposites in ancient religious and philosophical thought. The moon goddess promoted fertility but she also destroyed life. In Christian tradition, God in Christ cannot be both good and evil, fertile and destructive. He is one or the other. The other then is either the Devil or the Anti-Christ. Moon worshippers expressed the duality of their divinity in terms of the brightness or darkness of the moon: the full or celestial moon was interpreted as spreading goodness; the smaller the crescent, the greater the dimness and darkness in the heavens and, therefore, the possibility of evil.²⁹

As the narrator attempts to fuse the saint and sinner in his tale, his visualizations grow increasingly mysterious, blurred. What he seeks cannot exist in the clear, rational, differentiated world of reality. Only in his dream could the memories of Adrienne and Aurélie coalesce; then, engulfed by their presences, he sensed "a fatal attraction toward the unknown, like the firefly escaping into the rushes on stagnant waters. . . ."³⁰

3. Sylvie

Venus (Earthly), Moon Goddess Artemis (Waxing Moon), Virgin Mary (Terrestrial).

Sylvie is the only feminine figure with whom the narrator establishes a direct and relatively continuous relationship. She represents all that is normal, healthy, beautiful, fresh, pleasant, and natural.

Sylvie stands for the earthly Venus, as manifested in ancient times in her appearance in groves, gardens, spring time; she is fructifying and creative. Sylvie belongs to the country; she is in harmony with nature and featured always in pastoral scenes.

Because Sylvie is described as the most "beautiful" girl at Loisy, "good and pure in heart," she may be likened to Artemis and to the Virgin Mary. Artemis was a fertilizing force; she helped seeds to germinate, plants to grow, affected tides, and was instrumental in the evolution of plants and animals. She was also looked upon as the luminous god of the day. She is portrayed as a huntress chasing wild animals; a joyful maiden dancing, bathing with her friends; she is revered as a virgin goddess, instrumental in the healthy development of childbirth, though not necessarily marriage. Like the terrestrial Virgin Mary—the mother who gave birth to her other children with Joseph—Sylvie too will become a mother and wife at the end of the tale. That Sylvie may be associated with the virgin goddess Artemis as well as with the Virgin Mary becomes clear when analyzing the word parthenos associated with the great moon goddesses of antiquity. Parthenos, in ancient times, meant "unmarried," but not necessarily chaste as it came to mean with regard to Mary. When Isaiah wrote "and a virgin shall be with child" he meant simply that an unmarried woman would give birth.³¹ The virgin goddesses of antiquity differed from the Christian Mary in that the latter had been chaste when giving birth to her firstborn; the other children she bore with Joseph in a natural manner.³¹

Because she is an earth principle and represents the human side of Venus, the moon, and the Virgin Mary, Sylvie stands for balance and relatedness—the wife, maiden, and mother archetype all in one. She was a positive force for the narrator because she brought him down to earth, focusing, orienting and stabilizing him as best she could. She possessed everything he lacked.³²

Sylvie also comes to represent chronological, irreversible time. When the narrator focuses his attention on Loisy and wonders and Sylvie, asks is himself: doing at "What time is it?"³³ and wonders what she is doing at this very moment. Though he has no watch, he looks at a rococo clock wih the figures of time encrusted on it and with "the historical Diana" leaning on her stag and "depicted in bas relief under the face of the clock."³⁴ By associating mythological time (Diana-Artemis) with chronological time (the clock), he injects eternity as well as earthbound aspects into his image.

Time plays an important part in this tale with respect to Sylvie, as it had with Aurélie (when he noticed the Divine Hours When depicted youngon the frescoes of Herculaneum).³⁵ and enjoying Sylvie's company at Loisy, he had no notion of time; it was as meaningless as it had been for primitive man. Youth stands for activity, growth, and futurity; it cannot be viewed objectively. Only with age, when distinctions came into existence (past, present, future) does the narrator become aware of the destructive nature of time and equate it with loss of youth and death. When the narrator looks back at his adolescent years, he realizes that time is his arch enemy, propelling the days, seasons, years. Only by plunging back into his youth (through the dream or reverie) can he avoid the negative time factor.

Both cosmic and historical time are brought in during the national holiday celebrated in the "land of old families," in "castles lost in the forest," domains hidden from civilization. In part, the festivities consist in crossing a small pond that takes the guests onto a tiny island on which an unfinished temple stands, once dedicated to Urania, the muse of astronomy represented with a globe and compass. As a representative of the cosmic world (astronomy, astrology) she gives orientation and focus to her ideations by means of the globe and compass, making order out of chaos. The maidens, as they frolicked on this tiny island, reminded the narrator of beautiful Greek girls celebrating their festivities centuries back. The entire scene is likened to Watteau's painting Embarking for Cythera, the island on which Venus had once been worshipped and where Francesco Colonna experienced beatitude with his love. The image is not flawless: modern times intrude in the form of the up-to-date clothes worn by the guests. Once again he realizes that he is unable to experience either complete reimmersion in the past or perfection in reality.

Before and during the feast, "toward the last rays of the sun,"³⁶ the narrator notices a change in Sylvie: she is more seductive, more irresistible than his last image of her. Her smile has transformed her into a Greek statue: the symmetry of her features has become exquisite, her hands, delicate and white, "worthy of antique art" and "during the night hour" she becomes even more captivating and enchanting.³⁷ The narrator and Sylvie chat of their "childhood souvenirs," which, with the lapse of time, have become sacred to them; the past has been transformed into a hierophany. As their reverie deepens, so nature descriptions acquire new dimensions, uniting in their imagination both celestial and earthly spheres: images of trees that reach up toward heaven and bury their roots deeply into the ground follow; "their shadows are cast" on the waters, and such seemingly disparate forces as sky and earth are linked.³⁸

During the festivities, a wild swan, hidden in a basket under the garlands and crowns of flowers, flies forth toward the "dying sun" and in its flight displaces the garlands that the guests grab for themselves. The narrator avails himself of one, places it on Sylvie's head, kisses her as he had Adrienne so many years before, obliterating in her mind the pain he had caused her as a child.

In Adrienne's case, the swan image had been associated with death. With Sylvie, it represents womanliness—and a union of opposites or, for the alchemist, the hermaphrodite. The swan's body is female in its rounded contours but its elongated neck, associated with the phallus, symbolizes the male. The fact that Nerval's swan flies toward the sun, dropping the garlands of flowers on it way, stresses the dual aspect of the image—man (earth) and spirit (as it rises upward and drops the floral or female components that fall to earth, thereby returning them to mother nature).

In Wagner's Lohengrin (1846-48), the knight of the Holy Grail is led by a swan to rescue the Princess Elsa of Brabant, whom he marries. Upon learning of her violation of a pledge (she was not supposed to ask him his name or details of his life) he departs on the back of the swan to the Grail castle forever. The implication of the Wagnerian motif is that it is best to remain aloof from others, best to refrain from delving too deeply into relationships, because if one does so, love vanishes. To become intimate is to kill love, an emotion that is enhanced by distance and imagination.

The image of the swan as a composite of opposites and as used in Lohengrin may be a visualization of the course of the narrator's relationship with Sylvie.

Because of the narrator's desperate need to unite what is disparate, Adrienne's image intrudes upon certain scenes. When he walks through the country drenched in Rousseau-like atmosphere, he approaches a convent where he thinks Adrienne may have lived: "the moon hid from time to time behind the clouds, hardly lighting the dark grey rocks." These rocks, dating from Roman times, lend a sense of mystery to the atmosphere; they are also mirrorlike, reflecting a vague, clouded vision of ancient periods. As the narrator walks, his conscious mind is focused on Sylvie, yet he is invaded with Adrienne's presence. Both Sylvie and Adrienne seem to come to life in the spectacle of nature before him. He lies down on the grass, attempts to take in the entire cosmos in his embrace, falls asleep and reawakens the following morning to the sound of church bells. He is tempted to climb the convent wall before his departure but refrains from doing so because he feels it would be a "profanation" of Adrienne's image. The word profanation implies that Adrienne is a goddess; to approach divinity would be to demythify her and render her powerless.

Sylvie's earth-bound nature becomes all the more evident with the passing of years. Yet some quality remaining within her infuses her with extratemporal characteristics. She is a maker of fine lace now, and as she worked with agility a "divine smile" seemed to radiate from her face, elevating her; she is not a remote deity but an earthly and breathtakingly beautiful goddess. Later, as the two walk through the forests and meadows, listening to the birds, the sound of the flowing water, the entire vision is impregnated with flowers, trees and grass—a fitting background for this maiden, who draws her real strength from the ground.

Water images, used throughout the tale, link and unify what is disparate. The water is always "calm," describing most succinctly the soothing nature of Sylvie's attitude toward life; when walking, "the reflections of heaven cast their shadows on the waters," indicating the narrator's desire to encapsulate the world through her. He says: "I saw the distant ponds etched out like mirrors on a foggy plain." This suggests the muddiness and ambiguity of the narrator's attitude toward life, his constant dissatisfaction with the world of reality in its differentiated form. A puddle "formed a little lake in the middle of gladiolas and irises"—underscoring the fluid, mysterious and dreamy aspect of his relationship with Sylvie, as well as its terrestrial side.³⁹

Without water, life could not exist. It is a creative element just as Botticcelli's painting The Birth of Venus Emerging from the Waters depicted it. The flowing, calm and serene waters in the early sections of Sylvie are transformed little by little into dead or stagnant waters, or coexist, as in the following image.

The Thève flowed to our left, leaving at its bends eddies of stagnant water where yellow and white lilies grew, where, daisies like the frail embroidery of starfish burst forth. The fields were covered with bundles and stacks of hay, the odor of which went to my head without making me drunk, as the fresh odor of the woods and thickets with flowery thorns had formerly.⁴⁰

The stagnant waters in which the lilies grow symbolize the narrator's narcissism, his desire to fix things and to prevent any kind of change, his longing to live permanently in a world of beauty, idealism, abstraction. The immobility of this image is present in the very motility of waters: its continuous metamorphosis, its ceaseless activity. Its transitory nature is endless and, therefore, eternal. The lilies that have grown from the depths of these waters represent a fertile and positive force, but they also usher in moods of melancholia because they are rooted in Yet dead waters—notions have that and evolved.⁴¹ even narcissistic meditation never obsessions may have their positive results: they may produce a work of art (flowers)—in the narrator's case, the story itself. The piles of wheat in the distance also have value: they nourish and activate, and they indicate life's desire to cope with the forces that may hamper it. Wheat, as the "staff of life," encourages earth-bound nature to grow and pursue its course. Wheat suggests Sylvie, the earth-being; the stagnant waters, the narrator or poet. They are poles apart at this juncture, and it is fitting that he now realize Sylvie no longer loves him.

Sylvie, who has entered womanhood, is no longer satisfied with the tenuous, imaginative, poetic world that the narrator offers her. She must have more tangible things: a husband, children. She affirms life. When he realizes that he has been rejected from her world, he throws himself at her feet. "I confessed while weeping." He promises to change his ways. Just "Save me" he pleads. But both know that for Sylvie to enter the narrator's domain would be as fatal as for him to become part of her world.⁴²

When the narrator learns that Sylvie is to marry another childhood friend, the hard-working down-to-earth Grand Frisé, who is to become a baker, the Sylvie he had once idealized as Artemis, as the earthly Venus, as the sublime Virgin, is transformed into the prosaic country bourgeoise. "Illusions fall, one after another, like the skin from fruit and the fruit, is experience. Its taste is bitter, yet there is a bitterness about it which strengthens."⁴³

The narrator's pain is lessened when he remembers that her husband-to-be was his frère de lait; in a remote way they are related, so he is still bound to Sylvie. More important, Le Grand Frisé, who once saved him from drowning when he was a young boy, represents the steady, heroic force in life: the swimmer, the conqueror of the elements. By marrying Sylvie, he prevents another death—hers, which would have been inevitable if she had married the narrator.

Later, the narrator understands the meaning of his "lost star" of the loves he had experienced when a youth "which glistened with double power . . . two halves of a single love." Adrienne was the "sublime ideal," and Sylvie, the "tender reality."⁴⁴

The love the narrator felt for the three feminine deities in their triunal aspects—Adrienne, Aurélie, Sylvie—is a deep-seated death wish. By projecting onto them so continuously he had become completely passive, seldom reacting overtly in any way—rarely, except in the case of Sylvie, establishing any relationship with them. He experienced their force as a votary, a sacrificial agent. Unlike the aggressive heroes he so admired—Prometheus, Cain, Tubal-Cain, Adoniram—the narrator's sacrifice was in vain. He found no true love and could never concretize his ideal vision because he was himself incapable of loving either of the three protagonists as they were, on their terms. He could only love those characteristics he projected on to them, those aspects of himself or those he saw in them at certain periods in his life. As such, "they became a function of his own psyche,"⁴⁵ and when they could not conform to his standard, he experienced dejection and alienation. He was forever imprisoning Adrienne, Sylvie, and Aurélie in his own limited vision of them, viewing them always in terms of himself.⁴⁶ Because he was unaware of what was happening to him, he was incapable of judging, analyzing, or assessing their personalities objectively. He was dominated by his own inner world and what it saw in the three archetypal figures involved. No mediating function between the image he had of the three young girls and reality ever emerged. Only further disparity between the ideal and the real could possibly ensue—and with it, increased tendencies toward self-destruction or emotional castration.⁴⁷