CONSTRUCCIÓN COMERCIAL Y DE OFICINAS:

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odier’s unappeased thirst for fairy tales induced his monumental dream-reverie, The Crumb Fairy (1832). The fantastic adventures of the author’s protagonists, the young Michel, incapable of adapt- ing to societ y, and his beloved Crumb Fairy, are narrated mainly in f lashbacks within the framework of a “lunatic” asylum in Glasgow (Scotland). Studies and inquiries concerning insanit y and mental institutions were popular in the nineteenth century. In fact, the idea for Nodier’s The Crumb Fairy came to him after having read a letter from the Duke de Levis to a Dr. A. in La Revue

de Paris (May 1829) concerning new—but considered by Nodier inhumane—

treatments used in Scottish mental institutions (Nodier, Contes 156).

The tale reveals the metaphysical and psychological dramas of t wo hu- manized cosmic principles: Michel takes on the personalit y of a Moon Man and becomes the receptor of indirect occult knowledge; the love of his life, a wizened Crumb Fairy by day, at night manifests herself as a Solar principle— who claims at times to be the beautiful Belkiss (another name for the Queen of Sheba; Koran 27:22), or her descendant. To lend credibilit y to this and to his other fairy tales and fantastic writings, Nodier wrote insightfully: “[Y]ou must first write something believable, and to make certain that others believe what you have written, you must first believe it yourself. Once this condition has been accepted, you may boldly say whatever you like” (Nodier, Contes, preface by Castex 170).

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CTYPAL

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NALYSIS

Charles Nodier, born out of wedlock at Besançon in 1790, was not legit- imized until 1791. His father, a rather dogmatic gentleman, had presided for a short period over the criminal tribunal of that cit y during the Reign of Ter- ror headed by the much-feared Robespierre. Memories of horrific experi- ences remained incised in the lad’s mind throughout his life, and may have accounted in part for his later hypertension, nightmares, and insomnia. Some of the particularly excoriating spectacles he had witnessed as a child were in- terspersed in his short stories: rolling heads, pathetic cries, blood f lowing into gutters. Other reasons may have also triggered his bouts of morbidit y, his penchant for the fanciful, and the exotic as a would-be escape mechanism. Ever since he could recall, family life had been unpleasant. His mother, whom he never mentioned in his writings, had been a housemaid. He dis- liked her for her ignorance, brusqueness, and lack of feeling. From her he in- herited Addison’s disease (a malfunction of the adrenal glands, characterized by anemia and peculiar discoloration of the skin); he suffered also from peri- odic fevers, which did not abate with the passing of years. The opium he took at times aggravated rather than alleviated his condition.

A Catholic by heritage, Nodier did not find salvation in a conventional approach to worship. His needs being more complex, he turned to the writings of mystics such as Jakob Boehme (1575–1624), Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Martinez de Pasqualis (?–1774), Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), and Jacques Cazotte (1719–1792). Not only did they stimulate his imagination, but they helped him develop his own comforting credo as well.

Nodier married in 1808, and had several children, only one of whom, Marie, survived. Beautiful and charming, she became the focal point of her father’s life. After the marriage of his beloved daughter in 1830, Nodier suf- fered a bout of depression—perhaps a better term would be a kind of post- partum melancholia. He had lost the main attraction of his well-frequented Salon and, more accurately, the love of his life! Unable to see his daughter daily, he felt a void that gnawed at his very existence. More and more intro- verted, his dream world intruded increasingly and persistently into his em- pirical existence, bringing with it the momentary and necessary joys for survival. It has been suggested that Nodier’s death at home in 1844 had been perhaps caused by a continuously diminishing interest in life!

An inveterate reader, the very learned Nodier wrote on a variet y of sub- jects: natural history (Dissertation on the use of Antennae Insects [1789]); philol- ogy (Dictionary of French Onomatopoeias [1808]); the occult (The Army’s Secret

Societies [1815]); fantastic tales (Smarra [1821] and Trilby [1822]) to mention

l’Arsenal in 1824, he invited and received the most creative people of his day at his Sunday night gatherings: Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine, Dumas, and others. A storyteller in his own right, he would regale his guests with tales by Scott, Hoffmann, and some of his own manufacture as well. He spoke in a clear and elegant manner, gesticulating from time to time, his long, slender hands enacting the dramatic events he recounted, while his face mirrored a sense either of excitement or of serene melancholy.

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RCHETYPAL

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NALYSIS

The Crumb Fairy, a prolonged reverie of irrational images linked together in a

relatively comprehensible pattern, mirrored to a great extent haunting and ec- static imaged episodes in Nodier’s powerfully active dream world. What bet- ter way, he may have mused, was there to give body to one’s personal phantasms than in the fairy tale genre?

Nodier’s penchant for the irrational led him to praise the tales of Ernest Theodor Hoffmann—Devil’s Elixir (1816), Night Pieces (1817), and others— considering the author a visionary who brought to life an invisible and mys- terious world hinging on the practice of magnetism and the occult. None better than Hoffmann knew how to usher in moods of nostalgia and malaise. He seemingly was endowed with a sixth sense that allowed him to under- stand both human beings and nature, obscure relationships, and invisible phenomena that escaped scientific explanation. (Humphrey, L’Esthétique de la

poésie de Gérard de Nerval 52). Hoffmann’s inf luence was clearly discernible in The Crumb Fairy’s atmosphere of disenchantment, gloom, and quest for the

supernatural.

Scientific and metaphysical credos are also integrated into the fabric of

The Crumb Fairy’s plot and the souls of its dramatis personae. Some of the is-

sues developed in Nodier’s tale revolve around monism, broached by Diderot in his D’Alembert’s Dream; metempsychosis, by Cazotte in his tale, The Devil

in Love; and palingenesis, the fruits of Leibniz’s and Charles Bonnet’s philo-

sophical peregrinations. Under the guise of specific individuals and events, the universal domain is at issue in The Crumb Fairy. Two cosmic principles, male and female, participate symbolically in a hieros gamos, the alchemical for- mula for the sacred marriage of Sun and Moon.

NODIER’SREJECTION OFEMPIRICALREALITY. Nodier’s lack of realism and diffi- cult y in adapting to the workaday world is not only evident in his comportment, but partially explains his mental leaps into time and space during periods of slumber, waking dream, and in his writings. Unable to face the ugliness of

burgeoning industrial civilization, and longing to transcend the realm of ap- pearances, he withdrew into his own inner domain,which was rich in spirits, fairies, and sorceresses. Like the German Romantics—Novalis, Schelling, the two Schlegel brothers, and Tieck—Nodier was convinced that humans could not know earthly happiness because their souls were living in exile, longing to return to the heavenly spheres of their origin. Humankind’s fall from Paradise, as related in the Bible, the German Romantics contended, was tantamount to a separation from God. No longer one with divinit y, divided mortals belonged to two spheres: the world of matter (the earth) and that of spirit (the divine realm). For the metaphysician, life on earth became a long search for a path leading to primordial unit y with God, or a reintegration into the existence mortals had known prior to the Fall. Unit y with divinit y—the f lowing into the All, or Uni- versal Force—could be experienced at f leeting moments in a person’s lifetime: in dream, ecstasy, illumination, or transcendence of one’s identit y via medita- tion or other devices (Birch, The Disciples at Sais 70).

Together with other esthetic metaphysicians who had established what has been called an “autocracy of the imagination,” Nodier believed nature to be a living organism and not a mechanism capable of being reduced to its var- ious components or elements. In opposition to the eighteenth-century philosophes and ideologues, he distrusted the world of appearances. He yearned for a deeper realit y, achieved by communing with a profounder realm where God’s presence could become manifest. Glimpsing God and/or eternalit y in these vast expanses, Nodier felt shorn of his finitude and basked in sensations of well-being.

It may be posited that Nodier’s earthly existence consisted of an un- ending desire for oneness with God and/or with the Cosmic Soul. If life were looked upon as a separation from God, death, in this context, became a re- turn to Him. Death, it follows, was not to be feared nor treated as something ugly. It was, rather, a rite of passage, an initiatory process into another frame of existence.

NODIER’S EMPHASIS ON SLEEP. Like death, the notion of sleep, with all of its transcendent visualizations was likewise mystery for Nodier. It opened him onto the unknown, and thus he believed it to be a source of creativit y; he was mesmerized by its capacit y to usher him into the dream. “The first perception which emerges from the inexplicable vagueness of the dream,” he wrote, “is as limpid as is the sun’s first ray when dissipating a cloud. . . . It is in this re- gion that the immortal conception of the artist and the poet bursts forth” (“Quelques phénomènes du sommeil” in Nodier, Oeuvres V, 161).

The dream world imposed itself gratuitously onto Nodier’s life, acting on all aspects of it. His linking of waking and sleeping states, he maintained,

not only transformed realit y, but was a rite of passage as well into the beyond, enabling him to communicate with other species, with the dead, with past civilizations, and also to anticipate future events. During sleeping hours, he claimed, thought made acute inroads into his unconscious, taking on its most lucid and pellucid forms to the point of developing and expanding his per- ceptions and insights.

Forays into subliminal spheres had additional value for Nodier. They helped him deal with a corrosive source of guilt and unrealized—or uncon- scious—terror: most specifically, his pychologically incestuous love for his daughter, Marie. That love was the very life blood of his creative efforts and his mental well-being, and gave rise to dreams and fantasies, which helped heal the breach bet ween moralit y and the erotic.

“I ONLYWANT TOWRITEFAIRY TALES.” The fantasies and obsessions de- scribed in Nodier’s fairy tales released him from the pain and emptiness he felt throughout his life. “Until my death, which can come at any time,” he wrote in a letter (Jan. 3, 1830), “I only want to write Fairy Tales.”

Because of the conf licts beating within his psyche, Nodier, like Michel, the protagonist in The Crumb Fairy, longed desperately to experience the serene state of unit y that the fairy world had made accessible to him. He lived in a world of extremes, enduring intense turmoil followed by sequences of sublime love that allowed him to recover some semblance of equilibrium. Such mood swings eventually banished Michel from the world of dualit y which, he sensed, would tear him apart. Aware of the incompatibilit y of living out a paradisiac state on earth, Nodier labeled his protagonist a lunatic, and confined him to a mental institution.

Further analogies bet ween Michel and Nodier are in order. At about the age of t went y, the tense and nervously ill Nodier—as were many of his gen- eration who had experienced the Terror—succumbed to moods of extreme elation. Had it been due to his opium intake? Or his imprisonment at Sainte- Pélagie during the winter of 1803–1804, following accusations that he had written the anti-Napoleon satire “La Napoléone”? At the time, some of his contemporaries judged him to be mad. In 1830 the pendulum swung to an antipodal condition of severe depression and melancholia. His periods of im- balance, interestingly enough, usually preceeded his most creative moments (Castex, Le Conte fantastique 122).

MENTALINSTITUTIONS. Prior to the nineteenth century, insanit y in Europe was mainly not considered an illness, but a possession by the devil. The men- tally deranged were cast into prisons and/or dungeons, where they were chained to the walls, f logged, starved, brutalized, and frequently killed. A

cure, being effected only by moral and spiritual agencies, consisted in exor- cising the individual. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the mildly in- sane were sometimes cared for at religious shrines, or were allowed to wander about the land, frequently starving to death.

In 1792, Dr. Philippe Pinel, director of a hospital for male “lunatics,” Bicêtre in Paris, made one of the great breakthroughs in the treatment of the insane. Pinel’s decision, despite negative press, to remove the inmates’ chains, was, indeed, a heroic act (The Encyclopaedia Britannica XIII, 1898). To his de- tractors, Pinel maintained forcefully: “Citizens, I am convinced that the in- sane here (in Bicêtre) are highly untreatable because they have been deprived of fresh air and freedom” (Foucault, Histoire de la folie 249). Following Pinel’s forward leap, insanit y began to be treated principally as a disease, resulting in a diminution of cruelties heaped upon the unfortunate patients. By 1838, the move to transfer the insane from houses of detention, workhouses, and prisons to asylums constructed for the purpose, gained momentum. A simi- lar movement of reform was started in England by William Tuke, a member of the Societ y of Friends, and chief founder of the “Retreat” (1796), or asylum in the cit y of York, for the nonviolent treatment, care, and cure of insane members of that sect (Foucault 249).

In Paris, Dr. Esprit Blanche, a friend of Nodier, was unique among medical men of the time in his treatment of patients such as Gérard de Ner- val, a long time schizophrenic. Not only did Dr. Blanche dispense his care of the mentally ill with kindness and understanding, but used the most ad- vanced treatments of his time as well. Believing that close contact with pa- tients and the recreation of a family situation in a mental institution would be beneficial to them, he went so far as to make his home in a section of his clinic, a beautiful eighteenth-century building situated high above Paris—on Montmartre, where many windmills still dotted the horizon. Rigorous disci- pline in his clinic nonetheless prevailed: physical therapy, extensive exercise programs and, when necessary, Scotch baths (hot and cold showers used al- ternately). The latter were designed to shock patients out of their torpor or fury. Violent patients, under constant supervision by his well-trained staff, were placed on another side of the house. Only sometimes were straightjack- ets used. All forms of cruelties toward the patients were excluded. It must also be noted that Dr. Blanche’s wife, who was always on the premises, comfort- ing those who needed warmth and understanding, played an important role: she was a perfect mother image, with whom patients identified and to whom they responded (Knapp, Gérard de Nerval 101).

MICHEL’S“LUNACY.” Prompted by his compassion for those suffering from emotional problems, Nodier visited Glascow’s “lunatic” asylum on a trip to

the British Isles. It was there that his protagonist, Michel, was said to have been interned.

Considered ill-adapted, or mad, Michel fit Nodier’s definition of lu- natics: those “who spend their time busying themselves as little as possible with worldly matters, as if they had, in fact, descended from the moon, and spoke on such strange subjects, as could not have possibly happened in any other place, but on the moon” (Nodier, Contes, edited by Castex 175). Michel’s transcendence of the barriers of logic—or of “sublime reason” as Nodier noted satirically—made him all the wiser. Unlike the ordinary well-functioning citi- zen, secrets barred to the rationalist were revealed to the “lunatic,” whose psy- che transcended the time/space continuum. The very word “lunatic” for Nodier, then, applied to individuals who experienced altered states of con- sciousness, which allowed them to see into worlds unknown or unimagined not only by the normal well-adjusted individual, but by scientists as well.

The “lunatic,” (V.L. lunaticus), one who submits to the moon, was de- fined as an individual suffering from some kind of periodic bouts with folly or behavioral problems, and who was by nature capricious, fantastic, and dis- concerting. The moon, visible only as a ref lection of the sun’s rays and de- prived of its own light, has been considered since ancient times as the source of indirect knowledge or vision. The transformation of earth’s only known satellite during the course of a month has allied it with the feminine and her biological rhythms. For Pythagoras, whose ideas Nodier admired, the three days during which the moon was either invisible or dead to earth people marked the passage from life to death and back again. With light f lowing into the world of darkness came rebirth or renewal, a notion also applicable to “lu- natics,” who are susceptible to a sudden illumination, not of rational under- standing, but of cosmic knowledge! Such persons, Nodier wrote,

would occupy the highest degree on the ladder, which separates our planet from its satellite, and, since they communicate, as of necessit y, with other intelligences, from this degree, with a world that is unknown to us, it is cer- tainly natural for us not to understand them, and it is absurd to conclude that their ideas make no sense, and that they are not lucid, because they be- long to an order of sensations and reasonings which are completely inacces- sible to our understanding and customs. (Nodier, Contes, edited by Castex, “La Fée aux miettes” 176)

A “LUNATIC’S PEREGRINATIONS.” The protagonist of Nodier’s tale, Michel Charpentier, is from Granville, in Normandy. His mother had died shortly after his birth; his father was a businessman whose work had taken him to India, and so Michel was brought up by his uncle, a carpenter (Fr. charpentier, a trade that

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