[1] Through his translations, Nerval played a major role in introducing French readers to the works of German Romantic authors, including Klopstock, Schiller, Bürger and Goethe.

[2] His mother, Marie Marguerite Antoinette Laurent, was the daughter of a clothing salesman,[3] and his father, Étienne Labrunie, was a young doctor who had volunteered to serve as a medic in the army under Napoleon.

[5] While they travelled East, the Labrunies left their newborn son Gérard in the care of Marie Marguerite's uncle Antoine Boucher, who lived in Mortefontaine, a small town in the Valois region, not far from Paris.

At age 16, he wrote a poem that recounted the circumstances of Napoleon's defeat called "Napoléon ou la France guerrière, élégies nationales".

[8] Later, he tried out satire, writing poems that took aim at Prime Minister Villèle, the Jesuit order, and anti-liberal newspapers like La Quotidienne.

[11] It is the reason why Victor Hugo, the leader of the Romantic movement in France, felt compelled to have Gérard come to his apartment on 11, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

[12] In 1829, having received his baccalaureate degree two years late (perhaps because he skipped classes to go for walks and read for pleasure),[12] Gérard was under pressure from his father to find steady employment.

When Victor Hugo asked him to support his play Hernani, under attack from conservative critics suspicious of Romanticism, Gérard was more than happy to join the fight (see Bataille d'Hernani [fr]).

Le Prince des sots and Lara ou l'expiation were shown at the Théâtre de l'Odéon and met with positive reviews.

He started to use the pseudonym Gérard de Nerval, inspired by the name of a property near Loisy (a village near Ver-sur-Launette, Oise) which had belonged to his family.

Some specialists claim that his unrequited love for her is what inspired many of the female figures that appear in his writing, including the Virgin Mary, Isis, the queen of Saba.

And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad.In his later years, Nerval also took an interest in socialism, tracing its origins to the eighteenth-century Illuminists and esoteric authors such as Nicolas-Edme Rétif.

[20] Increasingly poverty-stricken and disoriented, he took his own life during the night of 26 January 1855, by hanging himself from the bar of a cellar window in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a narrow lane in a squalid section of Paris.

[citation needed] The poet Charles Baudelaire observed that Nerval had "delivered his soul in the darkest street that he could find."

After a religious ceremony at the Notre-Dame cathedral (which was granted despite his suicide because of his troubled mental state), he was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, at the expense of his friends Théophile Gautier and Arsène Houssaye, who published Aurélia as a book later that year.

[25] In 1867, Nerval's friend Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) wrote a touching reminiscence of him in "La Vie de Gérard" which was included in his Portraits et Souvenirs Littéraires (1875).

For his part, Antonin Artaud compared Nerval's visionary poetry to the work of Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Van Gogh.

[26] In 1945, at the end of the Second World War and after a long illness, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung delivered a lecture in Zürich on Nerval's Aurélia which he regarded as a work of "extraordinary magnitude".

[27] Umberto Eco in his Six Walks in the Fictional Woods calls Nerval's Sylvie a "masterpiece" and analysed it to demonstrate the use of temporal ambiguity.

[28] Literary critic Harold Bloom called him "a pure instance of Faustian man" but judged that "the sorrow of his unmothered and unloved existence destroyed him before" his genius could "fus[e] all the visionary's contraries together.