It was first published in the periodical La Revue des Deux Mondes in 1853 and as a book in Les Filles du feu in 1854, just a few months before Nerval killed himself in January 1855.
[2] Guillaume Apollinaire relates (in La Vie Anecdotique) that while writing Sylvie, Nerval spent a week in Chantilly solely to study a sunset that he needed for it.
The narrator, of noble status and who has recently come into an inheritance, decides to leave Paris, where he is living a debauched life of theater and drink, and return to the love of his youth, a peasant girl named Sylvie who has classic features and brunette hair, a "timeless ideal."
The narrator also loves Adrienne, who is of noble birth and tall with blonde hair; she is an "ideal beauty," but she lives in a convent and dies an early death.
[5][6][7] Julien Gracq wrote of Sylvie in 1966: "I know of no more enchanted narrative in our language" ("Je ne connais aucun récit plus enchanté dans notre langue").