Gérard de Nerval was the pen name of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essential Romantic French poets. He was born on May 22, 1808, in Paris, France. Nerval first became noted because of his translation of Goethe's Faust (1828).
Gérard de Nerval's first nervous breakdown occurred during 1841. In a series of novellas, collected as Les Illuminés, ou les précurseurs du socialisme (1852), he described feelings that followed his third breakdown. Increasingly poverty-stricken and disoriented, he committed suicide in 1855, hanging himself from a window grating.
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