an excerpt from:
Aurelia & other writings
by Gerard de Nerval

Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the "I", under another form, continues the task of existence. Little by little a vague underground cavern grows lighter and the pale gravely immobile shapes that live in limbo detach themselves from the shadows and the night. Then the picture takes form, a new brightness illumines these strange apparitions and gives them movement. The spirit world opens before us.

Swedenborg called these visions Memorabilia; he owed them more often to musing than to sleep; The Golden Ass of Apuleius, Dante’s Divine Comedy, are two poetic models of such studies of the human soul. Following their example I am going to try to describe the impressions of a long illness which took place entirely within the mysteries of my soul; I do not know why I use the word "illness," for as far as my physical self was concerned, I never felt better. Sometimes I thought my strength and energy were doubled, I seemed to know everything, understand everything. My imagination gave me infinite delight. In recovering what men call reason, do I have to regret the loss of those joys?…

This Vita Nuova had two phases for me. Here are the notes belonging to the first. A woman whom I had loved for a long while, and whom I shall call Aurélia, was lost to me. The circumstances of this event, which was to have such a great effect on my life, are of little importance. Each one of us can search his memory for the most heart-rending emotion he has known, the most terrible blow that fate has inflicted on his soul. It is a question of deciding whether to go on living, or die. I will later explain why I did not choose death. Condemned by the woman I loved, guilty of a fault for which I could no longer hope for forgiveness, nothing was left to me but to throw myself into vulgar distractions. I affected gaiety and lack of concern. I travelled about the world, and was foolishly fascinated by variety and caprice. I fell in love with the costumes and curious habits of distant peoples, for it seemed to me that in this way I was changing the conditions of good and evil, the terms — so to speak — of what for us Frenchmen are the "feelings."

"What madness," I told myself, "to go on platonically loving a woman who no longer loves you. This is the evil result of your reading. You have taken the conceits of poets quite seriously and fashioned for yourself a Laura or a Beatrice out of an ordinary person of the present century? You’ll forget her directly you start a new affair."

The dizzy whirl of a merry carnival in an Italian town dispelled all my melancholy ideas. I was so happy at the relief I felt that I informed all my friends of my joy and, in my letters, gave them as the permanent state of my spirit what was but a feverish overexcitement.