Les Filles du feu, with Les Chimères

Inside “Sylvie” nothing can be removed: the night at the theatre, the newspaper notice of the provincial festival, the sleepless return to the Valois, the three women folded into one another, and the last leaf where it is all set down as lost. Inside the sonnets the subtractive test fails on every line; “El Desdichado” is fourteen lines with no slack. But the unit is the book, and the book was put together in haste and for money. “Corilla” is a slight theatre scene; “Jemmy” is another man’s story retold; “Émilie” is a war tale whose bond to the other heroines is nominal; “Isis” is half antiquarian essay. Half the volume could go without loss to what the other half knows, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.

Score: 7.4 / 10

What “Sylvie” brings into the open can be stated and holds: that a man in love with an image cannot love the woman in front of him; that memory superimposes the actress, the nun and the country girl until they are one figure and none; that childhood’s country is lost by returning to it. Its last chapter says so: “Telles sont les chimères qui charment et égarent au matin de la vie”, “Such are the chimeras that charm and lead astray in the morning of life”. Sylvie herself is the disclosure, grown up, making gloves, reading Rousseau, marrying, and right to. The sonnets disclose a consciousness for which the sacred of every age survives at once. Held where it is because the lesser pieces disclose little.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Height is real and frequent where the book is at its best. “El Desdichado” opens “Je suis le Ténébreux, le Veuf, l’Inconsolé, / Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie”, “I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled, / The Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower”. “Artémis” opens “La Treizième revient... C’est encor la première”, “The thirteenth comes back... it is the first again”. In “Sylvie”, Adrienne sings in the ring of girls on the lawn before the château and is crowned with laurel in the moonlight, and the mystery play at Châalis rises too. Frequency counts, and the axis is the book’s: “Jemmy”, “Émilie” and “Corilla” do not rise.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Built, not evoked. In the sonnets the archetype is the syntax: Orpheus, “Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron”, “And twice victorious I have crossed the Acheron”; Isis; Artemis as the one woman who returns as the thirteenth hour; the Sibyl and the return of the gods; Christ as the abandoned son. In “Sylvie” the pattern is made of particulars, a real lawn, a Valois with its songs and its pageant of Cythera on an island in a lake, and Adrienne passing from the châtelaine’s daughter to the nun and perhaps to the actress, so that one woman becomes the Mother, the Saint and the Fay. “Isis” and “Octavie” carry the goddess into Naples and Pompeii. Held below the top by “Jemmy” and “Émilie”, which carry no myth.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Two turns, each costly. Nerval took the most regular of French forms and made it hermetic, syncretic and private, a sequence of names and emblems whose sense, the dedication says, would be lost by explanation: the hermetic sonnet before the Symbolists. He published it as a man whom Dumas had just announced to the public as mad, and the stake was his standing as a sane writer. The second turn is in the prose. “Sylvie” breaks the order of time in a short novel, with present, recent past and childhood interleaved without warning, so that the reader often cannot tell in which layer a sentence sits. The inherited models, Rousseau’s reveries, the German Romantic tale, the conte, are plain, and the departure from them is plain too.

Score: 8.8 / 10

In “Sylvie” the form is the knowledge. The confusion of tenses is the confusion of the women; retold in order, the story would lose what it knows, that the three are folded together only in memory. In the sonnets the closure of the form is the form of the obsession it holds. But the book’s own form, a miscellany of nouvelles under a conceit, with a verse appendix, is a container. “Jemmy”, “Corilla” and “Émilie” could be reordered or dropped and the volume would know the same things. Credited for the two works whose forms are their instrument; charged for the frame that holds them.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Demonstrated, not forecast. Les Chimères have sustained a century and a half of commentary without exhausting: esoteric, alchemical and Tarot readings in the twentieth century, biographical readings, readings of each proper name in “El Desdichado”, and the meaning of single lines is still disputed. “Sylvie” has been read for its structure of time by Proust, and again, closely and at length, by Umberto Eco, who translated it and returned to it as the type of a text that a reader cannot fully reconstruct. The two works go on yielding on every return. Held at 9.0 and no higher because the lesser pieces yield too little to lift it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is French literature of the mid nineteenth century, crowded with Hugo, Baudelaire and Flaubert. The intrinsic force is high: the sonnets reorganise what a French lyric can carry, private myth, syncretism, a key never given, and “Sylvie” reorganises what a short novel can do with memory. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, made “Sylvie” a lesson in the colour of memory, and the debt runs into the Recherche; Breton, in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), found in the dedication a word for what he meant and cited it; Eliot set the line of the Prince of Aquitaine among the fragments that close The Waste Land (line 430); the hermetic sonnet after Baudelaire, Mallarmé’s among it, stands in its line. The reach is narrower than that of Les Fleurs du mal.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a century and three quarters, from 1854 to 2026. Form: the text is whole and has been in print without a break. Presence is unequal. “Sylvie” and the sonnets are read, taught and set in French schools and universities and are widely translated; the volume as a whole, and “Jemmy”, “Corilla” and “Émilie” above all, is read mainly in the academy and in complete editions; and Nerval’s standing dipped after his death until Proust and the Surrealists revived it. A text read in part mainly in the academy sits at the foot of what such a span earns, not above it. Fabric: nothing in the masterpieces is fixed to its moment.

Score: 9.1 / 10

At the highest marks in the sonnets: rhyme and alexandrine strict, the names set as hard points of sound, Lusignan, Biron, Pausilippe, and the pauses of “El Desdichado” pacing the line. “Sylvie” is written in a limpid prose of eighteenth century plainness that hides great control of tense and transition; it opens “Je sortais d’un théâtre où tous les soirs je paraissais aux avant-scènes en grande tenue de soupirant”, “I was coming out of a theatre where every evening I appeared in the stage box dressed as a suitor”. “Angélique” is deliberately loose, digressive in the manner of Sterne and Diderot, and the looseness is partly made and partly the feuilleton’s. The remaining pieces are competent and conventional, in part others’ craft, and the book is charged for them.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the line of “Vers dorés”, “Un pur esprit s’accroît sous l’écorce des pierres!”, “A pure spirit grows beneath the bark of stones!”, and the soldier’s tale of honour and remorse at Bitche in “Émilie”. They do not obey one law. One physics governs “Sylvie”, “Octavie”, “Isis”, the dedication and the sonnets: the one woman under many names, and the dream that spills into life. “Angélique” connects by the Valois and by its chase after a lost past. “Jemmy”, “Émilie” and “Corilla” stand outside that physics and are bound to it only by the title’s conceit. The range is wide; the law does not hold across the whole.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Many orders are present: consciousness and its disorder, love, the family and childhood, a regional people with its songs and festivals, labour in Sylvie’s glove making, the Revolution and the wars in “Émilie” and in the memory of the Valois, the American frontier in “Jemmy”, antiquity, and the sacred of many religions at once. Achieved and integrated, they are fewer. In “Sylvie” the Valois, memory, love and a social order passing into another are held in one structure; in the sonnets, the sacred and the self. The rest are present, not integrated, and each stands in its own piece. Short forms are not charged for being short; the figure describes what the book holds as one.

Score: 7.8 / 10