There are few poets who have written as little poetry as Nerval and yet been accorded a major place in the development of French verse. Nerval himself would have certainly been surprised at the lasting admiration which Les Chimères (1854), a slender collection of eight poems of which five are printed here, has provoked. (It might have been some consolation for a life marred by an unhappy childhood, an unreciprocated love and a series of mental crises, and finally brought mysteriously to an end one January morning in 1855: he was found hanged not far from Les Halles.) His dense, allusive poetry which intimates the existence of a buried, gestating ‘Idéal’ waiting to flower again and redeem life, made him a natural precursor of the Symbolists (although their ‘Idéal’ was more distilled and celestial than Nerval's); while his composition of poems ‘dans cet état de rêverie super-naturaliste’ and his interest in dreams gained for him the adulation of the Surrealists. In direct opposition to the effusiveness of some Romantic poets, he introduced a new concept of poetic concentration into French verse, making his sonnets a kind of ritual theatre, and dispersing his expression of emotions among a play of ciphers – a formula so disturbingly new that Alexandre Dumas seems to have looked upon El Desdichado as a sign of the poet's madness.

The title, Les Chimères, announces two of Nerval's major preoccupations: his obsession with the universe of myth (‘les chimères’ are legendary creatures, half-lion, half-goat) and his awareness that the ‘Idéal’ he pursues is a dream and an illusion (‘une chimere’ also means a vain imagining).