Les Filles du feu (French pronunciation: [les fij dy fø], The Daughters of Fire) is a collection of short prose works, poetry and a play published by the French poet Gérard de Nerval in January 1854, a year before his death.

Scholars have identified its source as the ceremonies of Irish vestal virgins described in Michelet's Histoire de France (1833) or a poem in a novel by Alexandre Dumas, La Tulipe noire (1850).

[2] Les Filles du feu is dedicated to Alexandre Dumas, Nerval's friend and collaborator on works for the theater.

The previous December, Dumas had published an essay attributing Nerval's mental crises to an excess of creative imagination, an exaggerated emotional identification with the historic figures he wrote about.

In his introduction to the volume, Nerval elaborates on Dumas' analysis, describing how their old friend Charles Nodier once claimed he had been guillotined during the French Revolution.

Written in the form of twelve letters addressed to a periodical, Angélique recounts the author's travels through France and Germany in search of an antique book and his discovery of the diary of an historic Fille du Feu.

Much admired by Marcel Proust for its poetic vision, Sylvie is a semi-autobiographical tale of a man who is haunted by the memory of three women in his life, all of whom seem to blend together.

First, he remembers a festival where he danced with a local girl named Sylvie but was entranced by Adrienne, a young noble (whose resemblance to Aurélie is what brings on the flashback).

A short essay that is appended to Sylvie wherever it is published, it does not constitute a separate section of Les Filles du Feu in itself.

A translation, reconstruction and adaptation of a story by Charles Sealsfield, pseudonym of Austrian author Karl Postl (1793–1864), this tale of Jemmy O'Dogherty's adventures among the native Americans.

The narrator, wishing to escape the haunting memory of an "ill-starred love", decides to travel to Italy, stopping first in Marseille for a few days.

The next day, when he boards the ship headed for Naples, he sees her biting into a lemon rind, and tells her it can't be good for her, considering her chest disease.

While she goes to a hotel with her father, the narrator wanders around the city of Naples, eventually attending a ballet where he encounters a marquis he had met in Paris.

Years later, the author learns that Octavie has married a young painter, who, shortly after their marriage, became paralyzed and bedridden.

The night before the civil ceremony, Desroches tells some fellow soldiers how he had "killed the first and only man I ever struck in hand-to-hand fighting" during a Prussian attempt on the fort of Bitche.

At an inn the next day, Émilie's brother Wilhelm argues with Desroches' comrades about his own father's death at the hands of a French soldier in the same fort in Bitche.