AFTER JENNY COLON’S FUNERAL, WE FOLLOWED THE TWISTING paths at the Père-Lachaise cemetery that led from her burial site, past the tombs of the prominent people she would once have cast as her natural counterparts elsewhere in the artistic pantheon—Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and all the others. We skirted the crematorium whose soaring chimneys flanking the dome reminded me uncannily of a mosque somewhere in Turkey or Egypt—another one-way voyage to the Orient. Inevitably, our path led to the shaded bowers where—opposite the grave of Honoré de Balzac with its imposing bust of the novelist—a slender column, a sort of obelisk crowned by what might be an overflowing urn, is inscribed: “À Gérard de Nerval.”
Nerval was born in 1808 and died in 1855, but these bookends of a life are not inscribed on the gray stone. Indeed it has always been far from clear to me whether this place was a tomb, complete with remains, DNA, etc., or simply a memorial, placed there by his admirers after his tragic death in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, suspended from the Queen of Sheba’s waistband. So much of what I know of the poet’s life is hearsay, gossip, hand-me-down myth. But that has not been important. What has guided me has been the work, the canon, the oeuvre. The dark loss and longing of “El Desdichado” was my loss. His yearning for the unattainable star was my quest, too. He lived in a world that became mine, where the lines blur, between dream and reality, where love is something lost and never refound, where there are fires and betrayal. Of course, you can follow his biography—in and out of asylums, to and fro between sanity and madness—and conclude that his work is no more than a mirror of that clinical trail. But it is much more. Nerval turned words into magic spells, waves of a literary wand, hocus-pocus constructions that conjured feeling from souls thought doomed and barren. If he was the Prince of Aquitaine, so was I. The black sun doused my heart, too, in its icy light. On his last outing, on that January night in Paris, he told his aunt, with whom he had been living, not to wait up for him “for the night will be black and white.” My life, too, has veered between chromatic and other extremes.
Elvire Récamier took my hand as we approached Nerval’s monument along the gravel path. I had not trusted myself to visit the memorial before, and it was easy to stray off course among the homes of the dead in their neat, ordered rows, like macabre bathing huts for the changes of attire required on the banks of the Styx.
I had asked Ed Clancy and his wife, Marie-Claire Risen, to join us, because he had been dragged through so much at my side. Since he took over the executive editorship of the Paris Star, he had become if anything, more dyspeptic. But he had kept me on as a columnist with a generous traveling budget “for as long as you want it, old buddy.”
Elvire disentangled her hand from mine, prancing back and forth with her battered Leica, the brass showing through the black paint. She snapped me and Clancy and Marie-Claire and the tombs and Balzac and the columns. And she caught forever—on celluloid black-and-white Tri-X Pan 400 ASA film, for God’s sake—the moment when I wrapped my old volumes of Nerval in weapons-grade waxed paper (all except for a flimsy paper copy of Les Chimères,) dug a shallow trench amid the deeper graves, and left the almost-complete works with their terminal bullet as close as I could to the imagined feet of the certain master, murmuring, by way of incantation, “‘Je suis le Ténébreux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsolé—’”
The hallowed words. Now redeemed.
“I sure could use a drink,” Ed Clancy said.
endit
Paris, May 2011.