Editing Gérard de Nerval (section)

===Suicide===

Increasingly poverty-stricken and disoriented, he took his own life during the night of 26 January 1855, by hanging himself from the bar of a cellar window in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a narrow lane in a squalid section of Paris.{{efn|The street existed only a few months longer. The area had been scheduled for demolition in June 1854, and that work began in the spring of 1855. The site of Nerval's suicide is now occupied by the [[Théâtre de la Ville]].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Carmona|first1=Michel|title=Haussmann: His Life and Times and the Making of Modern Paris|date=2002|publisher=Ivan R. Dee|location=Chicago|isbn=1-56663-427-X|pages=249–51}}</ref>}} He left a brief note to his aunt: "Don't wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white."<ref>{{cite book |last=Sieburth |first=Richard |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YFHKmDZgd-cC&pg=PR31 |title=Gérard de Nerval: Selected Writings |page= xxxi |publisher=Penguin Group |location= London |year=1999|isbn=9780140446012 }}</ref> Just like in English, in French a ''nuit blanche'' (literal translation: a white night) is a sleepless night. {{cn|date=October 2024}}

The poet [[Charles Baudelaire]] observed that Nerval had "delivered his soul in the darkest street that he could find." The discoverers of his body were puzzled by the fact that his hat was still on his head. The last pages of his manuscript for ''{{ill|Aurélia ou le rêve et la vie|fr}}'' were found in a pocket of his coat. After a religious ceremony at the Notre-Dame cathedral (which was granted despite his suicide because of his troubled mental state), he was buried in the [[Père Lachaise Cemetery]] in Paris, at the expense of his friends [[Théophile Gautier]] and [[Arsène Houssaye]], who published ''Aurélia'' as a book later that year.

The complete works of Gérard de Nerval are published in three volumes by [[Gallimard]] in the collection ''[[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.la-pleiade.fr/Le-catalogue/Par-auteur/%28letter%29/N/%28author%29/1873 |title=Le Catalogue: Gerard de Nerval|access-date = 1 September 2015}}</ref>