The Salt Smugglers (33 page)

Lying twenty-five miles northeast of Paris on the rolling wooded plain of the Île-de-France, the Valois functions as a kind of “near abroad” in Nerval's work, for it is a region just far enough away from the capital to have retained its historic and geographic foreignness, yet close enough to the city to be accessible in a matter of hours. An enclave of premodernity — the recently built railway system made a beeline around the entire region, leaving it cut off from the nearby metropolis — the Valois is the locus of Nerval's earliest memories and a repository of the repressed histories of France. Arriving in Compiègne on the Day of the Dead to pursue his archival research into the de Bucquoy and Longueval families in situ, Nerval spends the November chapters of his feuilleton wandering among the ghostly presences of the past. As he makes his leisurely autumnal way through such magical place-names as Senlis, Chantilly, Chapelle-en-Serval, Chaâlis, Ermenonville, Ver, Eve, Dammartin, and Soissons, traveling sometimes by coach, sometimes by foot, intermittently accompanied by his childhood friend, a droll country bumpkin by the name of Sylvain (shades of Cervantes or Diderot), while artfully interweaving his own peregrinations with those of his seventeenth-century heroine Angélique, Nerval surrenders to a nostalgic errantry through space and time. In this suspended state of reverie, past and present converge into a single palimpsest where the various strata of the Valois' legendary history simultaneously coexist: the Utopian Enlightenment of the Illuminati, the pagan Renaissance of Catherine de Médicis, the early Gothic of Chaâlis and Senlis, the Frankish
kingdom of Soissons, the battle sites of the Romans and Gauls, the shadowy forest tribes of the Sylvanects, the looming Druid rocks ...

At the heart of this orphaned world — whose local Capet and Valois dynasties were displaced by the Bourbons, just as its Renaissance castle of Saint-Germain was abandoned for Versailles by Louis XIV — lies Ermenonville, the estate where Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived out his final days, only a stone's throw from Nerval's childhood village of Mortefontaine. Twice the narrator and his sylvan doppelgänger set out for the philosopher's final resting place and twice they are detoured and delayed; only on their third attempt, some eight installments later, do they finally reach the goal of their literary pilgrimage — the Isle of Poplars, site of Rousseau's now-vacant tomb, his mortal remains having been translated to the capital during the Revolution. In this allegorical landscape of ruins (much admired by Michel Leiris), a small marble temple stands nearby, also empty of its local divinity — the goddess of Truth. No doubt in honor of her absence, the narrator's rustic sidekick Sylvain reads him one of the more remarkable (false) documents that are inserted throughout the feuilleton, namely, his rough draft of a play on the death of Rousseau. Never republished by Nerval, this madcap scenario follows the philosopher's manic descent into dementia while a guest of Mme d'Épinay's at the Château de la Chevrette in nearby Montmorency, culminating in his final suicide (by hemlock
and
pistol) at Ermenonville — an exemplary fiction that translates the Socratic
philosophe
into a romantic Werther. In one of the climactic scenes of the play, the deranged Jean-Jacques launches into an imprecation against his enemies, announcing “his joy at having shaken this unjust society to ruination” while predicting “the horrors of a revolutionary catastrophe” to come. With this dramatization of the death of Rousseau — whose paranoia uncannily recalls the symptoms that landed Nerval in Bedlam in 1841 — the Valois portion of
The Salt Smugglers
draws to a close, its pastoral vistas receding into disconsolate rage ...

Although rarely read as a writer of worldliness — his name still evokes romantic legends of the eccentric who walked his pet lobster on a leash or of the suicide who hanged himself in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne with the Queen of Sheba's garter — the Nerval of
The Salt Smugglers
nonetheless reveals himself to be one of the savviest political novelists of the short-lived Second Republic. Like
The Charterhouse of Parma
, Nerval's newspaper serial provides a deft satire of the modern police state: where Stendhal takes on
Metternich's empire of fear (emblematized by the notorious Spielberg prison), Nerval prophetically registers the impending military dictatorship of Napoléon III, allegorically rhyming it with the absolutist France of Louis XIV (whose most Dantescan
bolge
is the “Enfer des Vivants” or Living Hell of the Bastille). In preparing his account of the abbé de Bucquoy's various prison breaks, Nerval not only had in mind Cellini's escape from the Castle Sant'Angelo, Casanova's flight from Venice's Piombi, or the various evasions from the prison of Vincennes by Jean-Henri Latude (the model for Father Faria in Dumas'
Count of Monte-Cristo
), but diligent historian that he was, he also consulted Constantin de Renneville's 1724
L'Inquisition française ou l'histoire de la Bastille
. The Bastille, however, functions as more than a mere literary topos in
The Salt Smugglers
. Nerval himself had been briefly thrown into jail in early 1832, mistakenly arrested as a “legitimist” conspirator during the police roundup that had followed the so-called rue des Prouvaires plot to remove Louis-Philippe from the throne. Although he would later make comic light of this incident in a parody he published of Silvio Pellico's
Le mie prigioni
, Nerval's confinement to a mental institution for nine months in 1841 — a hospitalization which he privately compared to Mirabeau's incarceration in Vincennes just prior to the French Revolution — marks a decisive turn in his representations of prisons. For example, in his biography of the founder of the Druse religion, “The Tale of the Caliph Hakem,” published in the
Revue des deux mondes
on the eve of the 1848 Revolution, he provides a virtually Foucaldian analysis of how political or religious heresy is silenced and immured (here, in the lunatic ward of Cairo's Moristan prison) by the repressive authority of medical science. Nerval's subsequent hospitalizations for mental illness — two months in an asylum in early 1852, followed by another eleven months over the course of 1853 and 1854 — are memorably evoked in his autobiographical
Aurélia
, whose carceral universe is never far from the ancien régime prisons of
The Salt Smugglers
.

Much as Nerval might have sometimes deluded himself into imagining that he was a political prisoner — the figure of Napoléon on St. Helena haunts his work from his earliest poetry onward — he was no Dostoevsky: at the very moment that
The Salt Smugglers
was appearing in Paris, the latter was expiating his suspected sympathies for the Revolution of 1848 in the nightmare confines of a
katorga
prison camp in Siberia. Similarly, France's most famous political prisoner, the firebrand republican Auguste Blanqui (known as
L'Enfermé
), had been released from captivity in February 1848, only to be resentenced to
ten years in jail in late 1849 when his left-wing extremism became a liability to the ever more reactionary Second Republic. The bloody June Days of 1848, which left 1,500 military and 3,000 insurgents dead, further increased France's prison population: of the 4,000 opponents of the regime deported to Algeria, a considerable number ended up at the prison colony at Blidah. During the military putsch of the night of December 2, 1851, Louis Napoléon (himself no stranger to prisons, having spent six years incarcerated at the fortress of Ham after his abortive coup d'état of 1840) arrested and incarcerated the major members of the opposition — including General Changarnier and conservative bigwig Adolphe Thiers, both of whom he summarily dispatched to the prison at Mazas.

Most of this contemporary history of the 1848 Revolution lies just below the textual surface of Nerval's newspaper serial, only rarely ruffling its Shandyan amiability. In the course of his visits to the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in search of bibliographic traces of the ever-elusive abbé de Bucquoy, Nerval stumbles onto a number of dossiers containing police reports from the year 1709. Although they have precious little to do with his mysterious abbé, he nonetheless devotes two installments of his feuilleton to quoting documents relative to a minor criminal case investigated by Louis XIV's police commissioners Pontchartrain and d'Argenson — largely, it would seem, to set up his own arrest a few installments later in the Valois town of Senlis by a local gendarme who wants to book him for traveling without identity papers (just as, in a similar scene somewhat later down the line, a Parisian archaeologist is arrested by the police for his suspicious taking of notes in front of a local church). Although these episodes are handled in a broadly humoristic fashion, their political message is clear: in these waning (and rather Weimarish) days of the Second Republic, the modern security state soon to be put into place by Napoléon III is already largely a fait accompli.

Compared to the scholarship devoted to the reactions of a Hugo, Lamartine, Baudelaire, or Flaubert to the political events of 1848 to 1851, Nerval's transit through this period of hope, horror, and disenchantment remains relatively under-studied. As a former celebrant of the July Revolution of 1830, he of course joined the rest of the Parisian literati in welcoming the abdication of Louis-Philippe in February 1848 — a revolution largely hatched and carried out in the newspaper offices of
La Réforme
and
Le National
, whose editorial boards figured prominently in the initial provisional government of Lamartine.
The June Massacres of 1848 — the first chapter in the modern civil war between proletariat and bourgeoisie, according to Marx — are alluded to only en passant by Nerval in his July introduction to his translations of Heine's poetry, here offered to the public as a quiet “prayer at the altar of poetry” during “these tumultuous days when the clamor in public places has rendered everybody hoarse.” In the following spring of 1849, attempting to cash in on the vogue for period pieces set during the great Revolution, Nerval published a historical novel in the manner of Walter Scott entitled the
Marquis de Fayolle
and drew its plot from the Chouan uprisings in the Vendée. Broken off after the feuilleton publication of its first two parts, this aborted project not only illustrates its author's inability to master the genre of the historical novel (a running joke in
The Salt Smugglers
) but also, at a deeper psychoanalytical level, his failure to successfully resolve the Oedipal scenario of political revolution — a failure to kill the father, which also determines the suicide of the young German student revolutionary in Nerval's 1839 political psychodrama,
Léo Burckart
.

The decisive blow to the progressive “demo-soc” (i.e., democratic-socialist) parties of the Second Republic was delivered, most historians agree, in June 1849 — when a state of siege was decreed in Paris to quash the demonstrations against President Louis Napoléon's unconstitutional dispatch of French soldiers to put down the Mazzini-inspired republican uprising against the papacy in Rome. Following the government's swift repression of the ill-organized street-fighting in Paris and Lyons, Ledru-Rollin, the leader of the left wing of the Constituent Assembly (called the “Mountain” in memory of Robespierre's faction during the great Revolution) went into exile, as did the influential socialist ideologue Louis Blanc. Surveying this wholesale collapse of the Left (which coincided with a cholera epidemic in the city), Nerval wrote to his old friend Théophile Gautier: “Paris has just witnessed a revolution
manqué
, a day of absurdities; in short, everything is done for and, to judge from appearances, for a long time too ... The poor Mountain has been razed and its principal leaders arrested, bunglers for the most part.” And then this perfectly Flaubertian observation (one thinks of the père Roque in
L'Éducation sentimentale
): “All we henceforth have to fear is the ferocity of law-abiding citizens, who are sure to put us at even greater risk.”

While keeping one eye on the fast-moving course of contemporary political events, Nerval, with his other, contemplated them
sub specie aeternitatis
— at
least to judge from his contributions to a popular
Almanach cabalistique
published in the fall of 1849 (which included satirical horoscopes of political figures as well as Nostradamus's predictions for the year 1850). Under the provocative title of “
Le Diable rouge
” (“The Red Devil”), Nerval provided a learned examination of the figure of Lucifer from the Old Testment and the apocryphal Book of Enoch down through Dante, Milton, and Goethe (the translation of whose
Faust Part Two
he was at that point in the process of completing). Underscoring (as had Shelley) the etymological root of the demon Demogorgon in the Greek word
demos
, Nerval construes the figure of Satan (and here he comes very close to Blake) as a figure of revolutionary libidinal energy and, via his role in Faust's invention of printing, as a Promethean benefactor of mankind — a champion, in short, of the “materialism” and “communism” that had inspired the European-wide uprisings of 1848. In a companion piece published in this same
Almanach cabalistique
, Nerval provides a survey of those “Red Prophets” who could be counted among the Devil's party: the Christian socialist Buchez, the Catholic populist Lamennais, the Polish nationalist poet Mickiewicz, the Fourierist Considérant, and the anarchist Proudhon — all contemporary descendants of those illuminati whose biographies would subsequently figure (together with
The History of the Abbé Bucquoy
) in Nerval's
Les Illuminés
.

Nerval's other response to the current anti-revolutionary turn of the tide was to coauthor a one-act play (conceived as a curtain-opener for the theater version of George Sand's
François-le-Champi
) entitled
Une nuit blanche, fantaisie noire
. A Hegelian farce featuring Soulouque, the Emperor of Haïti, who turns white colonists into his black field slaves, this vaudeville was shut down after four performances in February 1850, the portrait of the president of the Republic as a negro despot presumably having crossed the bounds of permissible satire. By contrast, Lamartine's blackface critique of the current Napoléon in his play
Toussaint Louverture
, performed later that spring, fared better at the hands of the censors, even though the liberties gained in 1848 were at this point eroding at an ever more rapid pace. In March 1850, the Falloux Law relegitimated the Church's prominent role in national education; in late May, the conservative majority of the Assembly passed new legislation which disenfranchised about one third of the electorate, most of them workers; sweeping new laws restricting the freedom of the press and of assembly were also enacted, the most ludicrous of these (at least from Nerval's point of view) being the
so-called Riancey amendment to the Press Law of July 16 — which stipulated that “any newspaper publishing a
roman-feuilleton
[i.e., serial novel] in its pages or as a supplement be required to pay a stamp tax of one centime per copy.” The state, in other words, was now prepared to police the boundary separating the real from the imaginary: whereas fact remained admissible in the public sphere of the press, fiction would be fined out of existence. And little wonder, for as the very title
Les Faux Saulniers
suggests — it could also be translated as the
Salt Counterfeiters
— in a fake Republic, presided over by a fake president who was very likely merely the fake descendant of the great Napoléon, no subject was more politically sensitive than the legitimacy of Fiction.