The Salt Smugglers

Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers was never published in book form during his own lifetime; to this day, this experimental serial novel lies largely forgotten in the pages of tome two of the Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres complètes, unavailable to the general reader. An ephemeral journalistic performance addressed to the political topicalities of the ailing Second Republic, the text first appeared in twenty-seven installments in Le National between October 24 and December 22, 1850, a year before Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état. Except for a brief hiatus in late November, it came out regularly in the Thursday through Sunday issues of the paper, the other days of the week being devoted to feature pieces on the theater, fine arts, or recent activities at the Academy of Sciences. Following the standard newspaper format of the day, the feuilleton filled four columns on the bottom third of the front page and four additional columns at the bottom of the reverse page. Each column was composed of thirty-three lines, and Nerval was probably paid the going rate for a journalist of his reputation, namely, twenty-five centimes a line — which meant he was earning a little over eight francs per column of print, or roughly seventy francs per installment. If indeed he was paid in full, he may have netted eighteen hundred francs for his efforts, a respectable sum for the period, yet a pittance compared to the thirty thousand francs that his friend Alexandre Dumas had raked in for the serial publication of his blockbuster Count of Monte-Cristo several years earlier.

A master of the assembly-line techniques of the new littérature industrielle (as Sainte-Beuve dubbed it), Dumas had used the columnar format of the newspaper serial novel to great effect: by foreshortening his paragraphs and pasting in great swatches of rapid-fire dialogue, he was able to significantly inflate the number of lines for which he was being paid. This typographical padding out of the text with blanks, however, at the same time created a new kind of visual prosody: given the precipitous speed at which these serials hurtled along, the half-distracted newspaper reader needed only to scroll down the column of print, rapidly scanning the events that unrolled upon the filmstrip before the eyes. Nerval, who was Dumas’ erstwhile collaborator and occasional ghostwriter, observes a similar economy of the page in The Salt Smugglers. This is the first edition that attempts to reproduce the actual disposition of the text as originally published in Le National: the four columns per double-page layout will, it is hoped, provide a reasonable facsimile of the novel’s original journalistic pace. Similarly, the French punctuation of the original — guillemets and all — has also been systematically retained, not only in order to “foreignize” the translation but, more importantly, to articulate Nerval’s quirky prose rhythms, nowhere more evident than in his liberal (and financially profitable) use of the digressional dash — atypographical flourish that earned him the sobriquet of “le Sterne français.”

When Le National announced the forthcoming publication of Nerval’s feuilleton in the early fall of 1850, the project bore the somewhat recondite title of ÉTUDES HISTORIQUES: LES FAUX SAULNIERS (Extrait de la Vie et des Aventures de l’abbé Bucquoi). No doubt anxious to avoid the punitive stamp tax that, according to the recently passed press laws of July, they would have had to pay if caught publishing fiction in their pages, the editors preferred to pass off Nerval’s text as a “Historical Study” (or, perhaps, more accurately “A Study in History”). The “abbé Bucquoi” whom Nerval had promised to deliver to his editors as the genuinely documentary (and not merely novelistic) object of his narration was a certain Jean-Albert D’Archambaud, comte de Bucquoy (1650?-1740), a minor aristocrat who lived during the reign of Louis XIV and who was best known as one of the rare inmates to have successfully escaped from the state prison of Fort-l’Évêque (in 1706) and, even more incredibly, from the Bastille (in 1709). An attractive candidate for a swashbuckling tale set in le grand siècle (Dumas had already mined this rich vein of the historical novel in his D’Artagnan Romances), the abbé de Bucquoy also attracted Nerval’s interest as an early Utopian fantasist who, during his later years of exile in Holland — where he lived to the ripe old age of ninety — had published a number of pamphlets proposing the transformation of monarchical France into a republic. In 1852, Nerval would recycle the abbé de Bucquoy portion of his newspaper serial (where, deferred until December, it occupied only the final third of the installments) into the collection of biographical essays he entitled Les Illuminés , or the “Precursors of Socialism.” A portrait gallery of a series of eccentrics ranging from the semi-fictional Raoul Spifame, a mad sixteenth-century social reformer and printer, to such eighteenth-century authors and adventurers as the prophet of revolution Jacques Cazotte, the “communist” polygraph and pornographer Restif de la Bretonne, the alchemist and necromancer Alessandro Cagliostro, and the neo-pagan philsopher Quintus Aucler, the volume outlined an underground tradition of misfits and illuminati all committed to the radical reimagining of political community.

As for the title of Nerval’s serial, Les Faux Saulniers, most contemporary readers versed in French history would have recognized the allusion to the notorious gabelle, or salt tax, one of the most despised revenue sources of the ancien régime — which required every person over the age of eight to purchase a minimum amount of salt (about fifteen pounds) each year at elevated prices set by the Crown’s monopoly and its corrupt tax farmers. Faux saunage (or salt fraud) was rampant in the provinces where the tax was highest, and in 1675, some seven thousand Breton peasants rose up against the gabelle, provoking a brutal repression by royal troops and an even more drastic revision of the salt tax laws by Colbert. Given these circumstances, the salt smugglers or clandestine salt makers known as faux sauniers (Nerval prefers the archaic spelling to saulniers) stood to make considerable profit on their contraband and, like the rum-runners of the Prohibition Era, were often seen as romantic outlaws in league with the local peasantry against the distant and ever more oppressive nation-state. By the late eighteenth century, more than three thousand French men, women, and children were sentenced to prison or death every year for crimes against the gabelle. After the French Revolution, the new National Assembly abolished the salt tax in early 1790 and amnestied all those accused of faux saunage. Reestablished by Napoléon in 1806 to defray the costs of his foreign wars, it remained in effect until the revolution of 1848, when, in one of its very first February decrees (laden with symbolism), the new provisional government eliminated the salt tax altogether — only to see it reintroduced in December later that same year.

Of all of this there is virtually no mention in Nerval’s feuilleton: its title, Les Faux Saulniers (literally, the “false salters”), turns out to be a false title of sorts. The abbé de Bucquoy’s brief falling-in with a band of salt smugglers occupies only a fraction of its overall historical narrative, with these bootleggers merely playing a supporting role within the larger drama of insurrection against the Crown during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — aprotracted civil war whose actors included the (Catholic) League, the (Protestant) Camisards in the Cévennes, and the nobles enlisted in that aristocratic backlash against absolutism known as La Fronde. Nerval calls this entire legacy of resistance against the centralized authority of the state the Tradition of Opposition and, in The Salt Smugglers at least, locates its epicenter in his native Valois, ancestral seat of Angélique de Longueval, the grand-aunt of the abbé de Bucquoy and the picaresque heroine whose first-person narrative of her adventuresome life and loves meanders in and out of seven early installments of the feuilleton. In 1854, Nerval cannibalized this entire portion of his newspaper serial and published it in Les Filles du feu as a separate novella entitled “Angélique” — a companion piece to “Sylvie,” his other tale of his childhood memories of the Valois (and Proust’s favorite among Nerval’s writings).

Lying twenty-five miles northeast of Paris on the rolling wooded plain of the Île-de-France, the Valois functions as a kind of “near abroad” in Nerval’s work, for it is a region just far enough away from the capital to have retained its historic and geographic foreignness, yet close enough to the city to be accessible in a matter of hours. An enclave of premodernity — the recently built railway system made a beeline around the entire region, leaving it cut off from the nearby metropolis — the Valois is the locus of Nerval’s earliest memories and a repository of the repressed histories of France. Arriving in Compiègne on the Day of the Dead to pursue his archival research into the de Bucquoy and Longueval families in situ, Nerval spends the November chapters of his feuilleton wandering among the ghostly presences of the past. As he makes his leisurely autumnal way through such magical place-names as Senlis, Chantilly, Chapelle-en-Serval, Chaâlis, Ermenonville, Ver, Eve, Dammartin, and Soissons, traveling sometimes by coach, sometimes by foot, intermittently accompanied by his childhood friend, a droll country bumpkin by the name of Sylvain (shades of Cervantes or Diderot), while artfully interweaving his own peregrinations with those of his seventeenth-century heroine Angélique, Nerval surrenders to a nostalgic errantry through space and time. In this suspended state of reverie, past and present converge into a single palimpsest where the various strata of the Valois’ legendary history simultaneously coexist: the Utopian Enlightenment of the Illuminati, the pagan Renaissance of Catherine de Médicis, the early Gothic of Chaâlis and Senlis, the Frankish kingdom of Soissons, the battle sites of the Romans and Gauls, the shadowy forest tribes of the Sylvanects, the looming Druid rocks ...

At the heart of this orphaned world — whose local Capet and Valois dynasties were displaced by the Bourbons, just as its Renaissance castle of Saint-Germain was abandoned for Versailles by Louis XIV — lies Ermenonville, the estate where Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived out his final days, only a stone’s throw from Nerval’s childhood village of Mortefontaine. Twice the narrator and his sylvan doppelgänger set out for the philosopher’s final resting place and twice they are detoured and delayed; only on their third attempt, some eight installments later, do they finally reach the goal of their literary pilgrimage — the Isle of Poplars, site of Rousseau’s now-vacant tomb, his mortal remains having been translated to the capital during the Revolution. In this allegorical landscape of ruins (much admired by Michel Leiris), a small marble temple stands nearby, also empty of its local divinity — the goddess of Truth. No doubt in honor of her absence, the narrator’s rustic sidekick Sylvain reads him one of the more remarkable (false) documents that are inserted throughout the feuilleton, namely, his rough draft of a play on the death of Rousseau. Never republished by Nerval, this madcap scenario follows the philosopher’s manic descent into dementia while a guest of Mme d’Épinay’s at the Château de la Chevrette in nearby Montmorency, culminating in his final suicide (by hemlock and pistol) at Ermenonville — an exemplary fiction that translates the Socratic philosophe into a romantic Werther. In one of the climactic scenes of the play, the deranged Jean-Jacques launches into an imprecation against his enemies, announcing “his joy at having shaken this unjust society to ruination” while predicting “the horrors of a revolutionary catastrophe” to come. With this dramatization of the death of Rousseau — whose paranoia uncannily recalls the symptoms that landed Nerval in Bedlam in 1841 — the Valois portion of The Salt Smugglers draws to a close, its pastoral vistas receding into disconsolate rage ...

Although rarely read as a writer of worldliness — his name still evokes romantic legends of the eccentric who walked his pet lobster on a leash or of the suicide who hanged himself in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne with the Queen of Sheba’s garter — the Nerval of The Salt Smugglers nonetheless reveals himself to be one of the savviest political novelists of the short-lived Second Republic. Like The Charterhouse of Parma, Nerval’s newspaper serial provides a deft satire of the modern police state: where Stendhal takes on Metternich’s empire of fear (emblematized by the notorious Spielberg prison), Nerval prophetically registers the impending military dictatorship of Napoléon III, allegorically rhyming it with the absolutist France of Louis XIV (whose most Dantescan bolge is the “Enfer des Vivants” or Living Hell of the Bastille). In preparing his account of the abbé de Bucquoy’s various prison breaks, Nerval not only had in mind Cellini’s escape from the Castle Sant’Angelo, Casanova’s flight from Venice’s Piombi, or the various evasions from the prison of Vincennes by Jean-Henri Latude (the model for Father Faria in Dumas’ Count of Monte-Cristo), but diligent historian that he was, he also consulted Constantin de Renneville’s 1724 L’Inquisition française ou l’histoire de la Bastille . The Bastille, however, functions as more than a mere literary topos in The Salt Smugglers. Nerval himself had been briefly thrown into jail in early 1832, mistakenly arrested as a “legitimist” conspirator during the police roundup that had followed the so-called rue des Prouvaires plot to remove Louis-Philippe from the throne. Although he would later make comic light of this incident in a parody he published of Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni, Nerval’s confinement to a mental institution for nine months in 1841 — a hospitalization which he privately compared to Mirabeau’s incarceration in Vincennes just prior to the French Revolution — marks a decisive turn in his representations of prisons. For example, in his biography of the founder of the Druse religion, “The Tale of the Caliph Hakem,” published in the Revue des deux mondes on the eve of the 1848 Revolution, he provides a virtually Foucaldian analysis of how political or religious heresy is silenced and immured (here, in the lunatic ward of Cairo’s Moristan prison) by the repressive authority of medical science. Nerval’s subsequent hospitalizations for mental illness — two months in an asylum in early 1852, followed by another eleven months over the course of 1853 and 1854 — are memorably evoked in his autobiographical Aurélia, whose carceral universe is never far from the ancien régime prisons of The Salt Smugglers.

Much as Nerval might have sometimes deluded himself into imagining that he was a political prisoner — the figure of Napoléon on St. Helena haunts his work from his earliest poetry onward — he was no Dostoevsky: at the very moment that The Salt Smugglers was appearing in Paris, the latter was expiating his suspected sympathies for the Revolution of 1848 in the nightmare confines of a katorga prison camp in Siberia. Similarly, France’s most famous political prisoner, the firebrand republican Auguste Blanqui (known as L’Enfermé), had been released from captivity in February 1848, only to be resentenced to ten years in jail in late 1849 when his left-wing extremism became a liability to the ever more reactionary Second Republic. The bloody June Days of 1848, which left 1,500 military and 3,000 insurgents dead, further increased France’s prison population: of the 4,000 opponents of the regime deported to Algeria, a considerable number ended up at the prison colony at Blidah. During the military putsch of the night of December 2, 1851, Louis Napoléon (himself no stranger to prisons, having spent six years incarcerated at the fortress of Ham after his abortive coup d’état of 1840) arrested and incarcerated the major members of the opposition — including General Changarnier and conservative bigwig Adolphe Thiers, both of whom he summarily dispatched to the prison at Mazas.

Most of this contemporary history of the 1848 Revolution lies just below the textual surface of Nerval’s newspaper serial, only rarely ruffling its Shandyan amiability. In the course of his visits to the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in search of bibliographic traces of the ever-elusive abbé de Bucquoy, Nerval stumbles onto a number of dossiers containing police reports from the year 1709. Although they have precious little to do with his mysterious abbé, he nonetheless devotes two installments of his feuilleton to quoting documents relative to a minor criminal case investigated by Louis XIV’s police commissioners Pontchartrain and d’Argenson — largely, it would seem, to set up his own arrest a few installments later in the Valois town of Senlis by a local gendarme who wants to book him for traveling without identity papers (just as, in a similar scene somewhat later down the line, a Parisian archaeologist is arrested by the police for his suspicious taking of notes in front of a local church). Although these episodes are handled in a broadly humoristic fashion, their political message is clear: in these waning (and rather Weimarish) days of the Second Republic, the modern security state soon to be put into place by Napoléon III is already largely a fait accompli.

Compared to the scholarship devoted to the reactions of a Hugo, Lamartine, Baudelaire, or Flaubert to the political events of 1848 to 1851, Nerval’s transit through this period of hope, horror, and disenchantment remains relatively under-studied. As a former celebrant of the July Revolution of 1830, he of course joined the rest of the Parisian literati in welcoming the abdication of Louis-Philippe in February 1848 — a revolution largely hatched and carried out in the newspaper offices of La Réforme and Le National, whose editorial boards figured prominently in the initial provisional government of Lamartine. The June Massacres of 1848 — the first chapter in the modern civil war between proletariat and bourgeoisie, according to Marx — are alluded to only en passant by Nerval in his July introduction to his translations of Heine’s poetry, here offered to the public as a quiet “prayer at the altar of poetry” during “these tumultuous days when the clamor in public places has rendered everybody hoarse.” In the following spring of 1849, attempting to cash in on the vogue for period pieces set during the great Revolution, Nerval published a historical novel in the manner of Walter Scott entitled the Marquis de Fayolle and drew its plot from the Chouan uprisings in the Vendée. Broken off after the feuilleton publication of its first two parts, this aborted project not only illustrates its author’s inability to master the genre of the historical novel (a running joke in The Salt Smugglers) but also, at a deeper psychoanalytical level, his failure to successfully resolve the Oedipal scenario of political revolution — a failure to kill the father, which also determines the suicide of the young German student revolutionary in Nerval’s 1839 political psychodrama, Léo Burckart.

The decisive blow to the progressive “demo-soc” (i.e., democratic-socialist) parties of the Second Republic was delivered, most historians agree, in June 1849 — when a state of siege was decreed in Paris to quash the demonstrations against President Louis Napoléon’s unconstitutional dispatch of French soldiers to put down the Mazzini-inspired republican uprising against the papacy in Rome. Following the government’s swift repression of the ill-organized street-fighting in Paris and Lyons, Ledru-Rollin, the leader of the left wing of the Constituent Assembly (called the “Mountain” in memory of Robespierre’s faction during the great Revolution) went into exile, as did the influential socialist ideologue Louis Blanc. Surveying this wholesale collapse of the Left (which coincided with a cholera epidemic in the city), Nerval wrote to his old friend Théophile Gautier: “Paris has just witnessed a revolution manqué, a day of absurdities; in short, everything is done for and, to judge from appearances, for a long time too ... The poor Mountain has been razed and its principal leaders arrested, bunglers for the most part.” And then this perfectly Flaubertian observation (one thinks of the père Roque in L’Éducation sentimentale): “All we henceforth have to fear is the ferocity of law-abiding citizens, who are sure to put us at even greater risk.”

While keeping one eye on the fast-moving course of contemporary political events, Nerval, with his other, contemplated them sub specie aeternitatis — at least to judge from his contributions to a popular Almanach cabalistique published in the fall of 1849 (which included satirical horoscopes of political figures as well as Nostradamus’s predictions for the year 1850). Under the provocative title of “Le Diable rouge” (“The Red Devil”), Nerval provided a learned examination of the figure of Lucifer from the Old Testment and the apocryphal Book of Enoch down through Dante, Milton, and Goethe (the translation of whose Faust Part Two he was at that point in the process of completing). Underscoring (as had Shelley) the etymological root of the demon Demogorgon in the Greek word demos, Nerval construes the figure of Satan (and here he comes very close to Blake) as a figure of revolutionary libidinal energy and, via his role in Faust’s invention of printing, as a Promethean benefactor of mankind — a champion, in short, of the “materialism” and “communism” that had inspired the European-wide uprisings of 1848. In a companion piece published in this same Almanach cabalistique, Nerval provides a survey of those “Red Prophets” who could be counted among the Devil’s party: the Christian socialist Buchez, the Catholic populist Lamennais, the Polish nationalist poet Mickiewicz, the Fourierist Considérant, and the anarchist Proudhon — all contemporary descendants of those illuminati whose biographies would subsequently figure (together with The History of the Abbé Bucquoy) in Nerval’s Les Illuminés.

Nerval’s other response to the current anti-revolutionary turn of the tide was to coauthor a one-act play (conceived as a curtain-opener for the theater version of George Sand’s François-le-Champi) entitled Une nuit blanche, fantaisie noire. A Hegelian farce featuring Soulouque, the Emperor of Haïti, who turns white colonists into his black field slaves, this vaudeville was shut down after four performances in February 1850, the portrait of the president of the Republic as a negro despot presumably having crossed the bounds of permissible satire. By contrast, Lamartine’s blackface critique of the current Napoléon in his play Toussaint Louverture, performed later that spring, fared better at the hands of the censors, even though the liberties gained in 1848 were at this point eroding at an ever more rapid pace. In March 1850, the Falloux Law relegitimated the Church’s prominent role in national education; in late May, the conservative majority of the Assembly passed new legislation which disenfranchised about one third of the electorate, most of them workers; sweeping new laws restricting the freedom of the press and of assembly were also enacted, the most ludicrous of these (at least from Nerval’s point of view) being the so-called Riancey amendment to the Press Law of July 16 — which stipulated that “any newspaper publishing a roman-feuilleton [i.e., serial novel] in its pages or as a supplement be required to pay a stamp tax of one centime per copy.” The state, in other words, was now prepared to police the boundary separating the real from the imaginary: whereas fact remained admissible in the public sphere of the press, fiction would be fined out of existence. And little wonder, for as the very title Les Faux Saulniers suggests — it could also be translated as the Salt Counterfeiters — in a fake Republic, presided over by a fake president who was very likely merely the fake descendant of the great Napoléon, no subject was more politically sensitive than the legitimacy of Fiction.

Eighteen forty-eight, “the springtime of the people,” was also very much a springtime of the printed word. The early years of the Second Republic saw the creation of some 400 new periodicals in France — not to mention an explosion of almanacs, broadsheets, popular prints, caricatures, and cabinets de lecture for the people’s perusal — and the combined daily press runs for all Paris newspapers rose from 50,000 to 400,000 as a result (by contrast, after the draconian press laws of February 1852, only fourteen Parisian daily newspapers were left standing). The stamp tax levied on the publication of serial novels by the Riancey amendment was thus part of a broader right-wing strategy to strangle the popularity and the profitability of the daily press. The fact that this law should have specifically targeted the roman-feuilleton may in part be due to the Assembly’s apprehension about the rabble-rousing success of the recently elected socialist representative Eugène Sue, whose serial novels, Les Mystères de Paris and subsequent Mystères du peuple, were seen as encouraging populist uprisings against the regime not only because of their unflinching representation of the miseries of the urban masses but, perhaps more importantly, because they encouraged a kind of participatory democracy among their reading public, consisting of recitations of their latest installments in the workplace or letters to their author from readers offering commentaries and corrections — a feature that Nerval would imitate in The Salt Smugglers by including (fictitious?) correspondence addressed to him by subscribers to Le National. The Riancey amendment, in any event, proved a blessing in disguise for Nerval, for it provided him with the basic comic shtick of his feuilleton: ever anxious to follow the letter of the law and please the censor, its hapless narrator will valiantly attempt to avoid “committing a novel” (as he puts it), only to fail again and again as he discovers that “history” itself is nothing more than a purely linguistic, purely narrative construct whose “facts” are often no more stable than the six different spellings of the abbé de Bucquoy’s name.

As if this legislative enforcement of the ideology of referentiality were not enough — after all, Plato’s Republic, recognizing the perils of unfounded mimesis, had similarly recommended the expulsion of poets — there was another rider attached to these press laws of July 16, namely, the so-called Tinguy amendment, which required that any newspaper article dealing with “matters political, philosophical, or religious” be signed by the name of its author. Gérard Labrunie, who had spent most of his literary career publishing under a variety of initials and pseudonyms before arriving at his definitive nom de plume Gérard de Nerval in the 1840s, could not fail to be amused and alarmed by this attempt to institutionalize the “author function” (as Foucault calls it) by fixing the legal liability of utterance within the locus of the proper name. He wryly observed that this new law obliging journalists to affix their signatures to their articles would no doubt lead writers to “develop their personalities beyond measure,” causing them to preen and posture in front of their readers. Whereas the “we” traditionally used by the feuilletoniste indicated that the opinions he offered were not simply his own, but rather those collectively held by the staff of his newspaper or by the guild of his literary confreres, the newly instituted regime of the “I” (so Nerval argued) broke down this spirit of community, leaving the author a “mere individual, a mere spectator, constrained at all points to protect his own personal dignity and modesty” from the glare of public — and legal — exposure.

To protect his privacy on the public page, Nerval devised an elaborate cat and mouse game with his censors — and his readers. Even as he puts in his daily conversational visits to his public, gently nudging it with his elbow like some affable eighteenth-century narrator, he remains forever elusive — much like his alter egos the abbé de Bucquoy or Angélique de Longueval, both “historical” figures to be sure, but in the end only knowable as evanescent textual traces. At moments these autofictional sleights of hand leave Sterne or Diderot behind altogether and seem to anticipate the New Journalism of the 1960s. It is difficult, at any rate, to think of any other French newspaper writer before Nerval who had adapted the essayistic feuilleton mode to this level of random autobiographical disclosure: he shares with us his childhood memories of the Valois, his battles with censors and theater directors during the 1839 production of his play Léo Burckart, his recent travels in Germany, and even informs us of his imminent eviction from his current apartment in Paris because of the planned urban renewal of his neighborhood — the historical veracity of which he proves by reprinting the actual (?) expropriation notice sent to him by the prefecture of the Seine. Yet even as we think we have entered into the quotidian intimacy of our narrator, sharing in his frustrations with the French postal system as he tries to dispatch his copy back to the capital or sympathizing with his ill treatment at the hands of a grumpy bookseller (on whom he takes revenge by printing his business address at the bottom of the page to warn away future customers), the Nervalian “I” keeps slipping through our fingers, lost in the labyrinth of the Archive, its voice receding into the intertextual murmur of the Library of Babel.

Nearly two months after embarking upon his initiatory quest for the rare book containing the life and adventures of the abbé de Bucquoy, our narrator informs his newspaper readers that he has at last reached his grail. It is now their turn to speak. Lector in fabula:

“And then ...” (This is how Diderot began one of his stories, someone is bound to remind me.)

“Go on!”

“You have merely imitated Diderot.”

“Who had imitated Sterne ...”

“Who had imitated Swift ...”

“Who had imitated Rabelais ...”

“Who had imitated Merlinus Coccaius ...”

“Who had imitated Petronius ...”

“Who had imitated Lucian. And Lucian had imitated numerous others ... And most particularly, the author of Odyssey, who led his hero around the Mediterranean for ten years before finally bringing him home to that fabled Ithaca, whose queen, hounded as she was by some fifty suitors, spent every night undoing what she had woven that day.”

“But Ulysses finally found his way back to his Ithaca.”

“And I found my way back to my abbé de Bucquoy.”

“Tell me about it.”

This exchange provides a textbook example of what the Russian critic Mikhael Bakhtin defined as the “dialogism” of the novel — agenre whose origins he located in exactly the same tradition as Nerval (the Odyssey, Hellenistic romance, Rabelais, etc.). Dialogism, for Bakhtin, represents the liberatory subversion of all forms of monologic authoritarianism — the literary equivalent, as it were, of violating salt monopolies and of bootlegging contraband across borders. The Salt Smugglers is a “polyphonic” text in very much this political sense, for its “eccentricity” (a favorite word of Nerval’s) works to undermine any stable notion of a sovereign center, replacing it instead with the unlicensed play of multiple narratives, multiple temporalities, multiple voices. For a newspaper serial of this relatively brief compass, the generic diversity and hybridity of Nerval’s text are startlingly (pre-post-)modern. Although framed as an epistolary novel (i.e., as a series of letters to the director of Le National), its pages serve up a carnival feast of proven recipes for fiction: the quest romance, the picaresque novel, the adventure story, the detective tale, the confessional memoir, the folk legend, the anecdote, the conte fantastique, and, of course, the historical novel — all punctuated by various found textual objects that are collaged into the narrative (police reports, book catalogue entries, snippets from manuals of heraldry, tombstone inscriptions, not to mention the periodic strains of verse, both rhymed and free, that sing forth from the contrapuntal motifs of his prose). Nerval at one point refers to his work as a “symphonie pastorale,” thus hinting at the musical structure of his performance — the syncopations of whose chapter breaks and the unpredictable modulations of whose tonalities (now idyll, now elegy, now satire) also look forward to the riffs and improvised solos of jazz. Behind this term “symphony” one also hears distant echoes of the Sympoesie theorized and practiced by the Jena Romantics — a collective work (or act) of art based, like Nerval’s experimental fiction, on the Utopian imagination of a community engaged in a revolutionary process of continual remembering and remaking and retelling: