Daughters of Fire — Gerard De Nerval

Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), a contemporary of Poe, De Quincey, Gogol and Heine, introduced into French literature a mode of writing rooted in German romanticism yet already recognizably modernist in its explorations of the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction. I'm in a constant search for writers with mental illness. Gerard de Nerval fits the bill and as a 19th Century French writer bent on eccentricities and called bousingos or 'rowdies' known for their orgies, eating ice cream out of skulls, nudity at seminars. Nerval went insane and spent the rest of his life in and out of an asylum and eventually killed himself......the end of his considered greatest work Aurelia was in his pocket was found in his pocket when he hung himself. Aurelia is his account of his fall into madness..........