"And this almost deadly feeling of bliss which takes possession of me in your embrace, Belkis? The Fairy never gave me this."
"No, naturally," is the laughing answer; "but 'at night all cats are grey.'"
Henceforward Michel lives a divided life; his days are spent with the wise old Fairy, his nights with the beautiful young Queen of Sheba, until at last he finds the singing mandragora, and, having made his escape from the madhouse, mounts to the Fairy's and Belkis's heaven on the wings of the mandragora's song.
This is madness, no doubt, but it is marvellous madness—madness instinct with soul. Who is this crumb-gathering fairy? Is she wisdom? Is she renunciation and duty? Is she the inexhaustible patience which suddenly reveals itself as genius? Is she fidelity turning into the happiness that is the reward of fidelity? She is probably a little of all of this; and therefore it is that she can transform herself into youth and beauty and bliss. In some such fashion Nodier has thought out, or dreamt his story.
At its maturity his imaginative faculty is more wanton and bold. No longer contented with producing shapeless, unordered material, he presents his material to us with a grotesque, loquacious, satirical explanation. No Frenchman comes so near having what Englishmen and Germans call humour as Nodier. At times he seems to be positively possessed by whimsicality. Then he not only turns the everyday world topsy-turvy in his stories, but plays with his own relation to the story, satirises contemporaries, makes a thousand innuendoes, philosophises over the illusions of life. He takes even the art of the printer into his service to heighten his fantastic effects; or, more correctly speaking, in order to prove the absolute power of his personality over his material, he leaves not a single thing, not even the purely mechanical means of communication, untouched by his mood. In his famous tale, Le Roi de Bohème et ses sept Châteaux, he exhausted the resources of the printing establishment. At his command the letters become so long that they stretch from top to bottom of the page; he commands again, and they dwindle into the tiniest of the tiny; he screams, and they stand up on end in terror; he becomes melancholy, and they hang their heads all along the lines; they are inseparably mixed up with illustrations; Latin and Gothic groups alternate, according to the mood of the moment; sometimes they stand on their heads, so that we have to turn the book upside down to read them; sometimes they follow the narrative so closely that a descent of the stairs is printed thus:
Hereupon
our
hero
went
dejectedly
down
the
stairs.
It is interesting to trace in the account of Nodier's life written by his daughter, the foundations of fact upon which he built his fantastic tales. It rarely happens that, as in Inès de Las Sierras, something real (in this case an old castle which Nodier had visited in the course of a tour he made with his family in Spain in 1827) forms the groundwork. Sometimes, as for example in Trilby, the point of departure is a legend; and it is significant that this particular legend should have been told to Nodier by Pichot, the French translator of Scott and Byron. The idea of Smarra Nodier got from hearing the old porter of his house in Paris, who was too ill to sleep anywhere except sitting in his chair, relate his nightmares and dreams. The model for the Fée aux Miettes was an old woman who served in his father's house when he was a child, and who treated his father, a man of sixty, as if he were a giddy youth. This old Denise maintained that before entering the Nodiers' household she had been in the service of a Monsieur d'Amboise, governor of Château-Thierry. When she held forth on this subject, she mixed up with her own experiences reminiscences of the most extraordinary events and most antiquated customs; and the family, out of curiosity, caused inquiry to be made about this remarkable governor. The archives of the town showed that only one of the name had ever existed, and that he had died in 1557. One can see how the story of the fairy evolved itself out of this curious incident. The very slightest element of fact—a landscape, a legend, a dream, a lie, a mere mote—was enough for Nodier.
The amiable, clever man, whose house was for a number of years the rendezvous of the men of letters who made their début about 1830, the place where all the talented young beginners repaired to seek encouragement and, if possible, permission to read a ballad or a little piece of prose before the select company which assembled there on Sunday afternoons, this man in his proper person represents the extreme of Romantic fantasticality in the literature of the period. The fantastic supernaturalism which was the main characteristic of German Romanticism, is only one of the poles of French Romanticism; or, to speak more correctly, it is merely one of its elements—in some of the most notable men of the school a weak and subordinate, in others an important element, but an element always present. In Victor Hugo's case it announces itself at once, in his Ronde du Sabbat, and makes itself forcibly felt in the great Légende des Siècles, though in this latter the legend is only naïve history; we have a glimpse of it even in the rationalistic Mérimée (half explained away in La Vénus d'Ille, more distinct in La Vision de Charles XI. and Les âmes du purgatoire); it reigns, half-seraphic, half-sanguinarily sensual, in Lamartine's La chute d'un ange; it pervades Quinet's pantheistically vague Ahasvère; it appears in George Sand's old age in the pretty fairy-tales she writes for her grandchildren; it occupies even the plastic Gautier in the many tales in which he allows himself to be influenced by Hoffmann; and, as Swedenborgian spiritism, it actually, in a romance like Séraphitus-Séraphita, completes Balzac's great Comédie Humaine. But in no other author has it the naïve originality and the poetic force which distinguish Nodier.
[1] Nodier's youth and first literary efforts are described in The Emigrant Literature.