Nerval himself described this collection as “descent into hell”. Aurélia resurrects the myth of Orpheus in a succession of prophetic dreams and visual delusions that the surrealists were to make their honey. In his “little coat, brown with cobwebs,” Nerval constantly rubbed shoulders with madness, and, in a single case in literature, humbly abandoned himself to it, in all lucidity. Even Rimbaud will hardly go any farther. Writing as if under the dictation of supernatural forces, in a panting, precipitate style (he will commit suicide shortly afterward), the poet divests himself without regrets of all the artifices of the real. The dream alone can answer his hallucinatory questions. Apocalyptic images, shrieking cries (“The universe is in the night”), Nerval, Wanderings without sun, seeks at once the ghosts of his lost mother and his love. He creates to finish a unique masterpiece, a solitary star, and finds there the immortality so much desired
