Les Confidences de Nicolas: Histoire d'une vie littéraire au XVIIIe siècle (review)

Gérard de Nerval's 1850 Les Confidences de Nicolas paints a fascinating portrait of the libertine writer, printer, and social reformer Nicolas Rétif de la Bretonne (1734 – 1806). Nerval's text is not a standard literary biography. An objective, empirically researched biography of Rétif would be nearly impossible, since the main source of information on this most prolific of eighteenth-century writers comes from Rétif 's own romanticized autobiography, Monsieur Nicolas. In Les Confidences de Nicolas, then, Nerval selects and rewrites passages of Monsieur Nicolas into a treatise on the art of writing, on realism in literature, and, eventually, on madness. The reader quickly discovers that what most interests Nerval is not a complete understanding of Rétif 's life taken as a whole, if such a holistic view is even possible, but rather the aspects of his life which most closely mirror Nerval's own anxieties. Like Rétif, Nerval was a compulsive walker (Rétif the author of Les Nuits de Paris, Nerval of Les Nuits d'octobre and Promenades et souvenirs), a man who invented fantastic myths about his own origins (they both claimed a Roman emperor as an ancestor), a writer who insisted on being known by his first name (Nicolas and Gérard). By allowing Nerval to study the connections between passion and memory and to understand the effects of madness on writing (or at least Rétif 's seemingly uncontrollable sexual appetite), Les Confidences de Nicolas paves the way for the extraordinary prose works of Nerval's final years, Sylvie and Aurélia.

Nerval frequently published collections of works that had already appeared separately, as both a way to make money, but also for literary reasons, as the same themes repeat and develop within each collection. Major sections of Voyage en Orient, Les Illuminés, and Les Filles du feu were published separately. Most new editions of Nerval's works, favor the last, collected, version as definitive. Michel Brix, the editor of this re-edition, however, has made the unorthodox decision to publish the 1850 version of Les Confidences de Nicolas on its own, and not as part of Les Illuminés from 1852. The original, or at least first, context of the work allows Brix to focus on the connections between Les Confidences and Nerval's entire work and life, while minimizing its connections to the other figures in Les Illuminés. This has the added advantage of slimming the volume, thus allowing for a substantive preface by Brix.

Brix's preface is the reason to buy the book — not least because many cheaper and better footnoted paperback editions of Les Illuminés offer more value for the money. Brix's preface focuses on what Nerval leaves out of his biography, showing that Nerval's Rétif is more coherent than the "real" Rétif found in Monsieur Nicolas. Brix, the author of Eros et littérature and L'Héritage de Fourier: Utopie Amoureuse et libération sexuelle, argues that Nerval's censorship of Rétif 's libertinage opens a window onto Nerval's own, muted, eroticism.