answer seems obvious to me: because they keep returning. Readers rarely draw maps for themselves, but they sense (in their ears) that with every “return” to the Valois, Jerard goes back to the same places, almost in the same order, as if the same motif started up after every stanza. In music this form is called a rondo, and the term ” rondeau”comes from “ronde, “which means a round dance. So readers perceive aurally a circular structure, and in some sense they see it, yet they see it only in a confused way, as if it were a spiral movement, or a successive shifting of circumferences.

For this reason it is worth reconstructing the map, to understand visually what the text makes us feel aurally. You will see on my little table, starting from Loisy, three nonconcentric, differently shaded circles. They trace the three main walks—not the real journey, but the presumed area of the trip. The lightest circle refers to Jerard’s nocturnal walk in chapter 5 (from Loisy to Montagny—or, rather, Mortefontaine—but changing direction to skirt the Ermenonville forest, going past Saint-S, and returning at last to Loisy, while Pontarmè, Thiers, or La Butte can be seen in the distance); the slightly shaded circle represents Jerard’s walk in chapter 9 (from the dance area to his uncles house—which must be at Mortefontaine—then to Loisy and finally to Ermenonville as far as Rousseau’s tomb, and returning once more to Loisy); the darkest circle follows Jerard’s and Sylvie’s walk to Châalis in chapters 10 and 11 (from Loisy, through the forest of Ermenonville as far as Châalis, then back to Loisy via Charlepont). The journey to Othys is a round trip to the eighteenth century and back.

Finally, the biggest circle, which covers the entire area in Table B, corresponds to the wanderings with Aurélie in chapter 13. Jerard tries desperately to find everything and loses the central core of his first wanderings. He will never find it again. In the end, since Sylvie by now lives in Dammartin, the returns mentioned in chapter 14 never go beyond the margins of this circumference. Jerard, Sylvie, everyone, they are all now excluded from the magic circle at the start, which Jerard can see only at a great distance, from a hotel window.

In any case, what strikes us visually (as we previously had been struck aurally, albeit in the guise of echoes answering each other from a distance) is that in every journey Jerard simply goes around in a circle (not as in the perfect circle of the first dance with Adrienne, but like a crazed moth fluttering inside a lampshade on a chandelier) and never rediscovers what he had left there on the previous occasion. So much so that one has to agree with Poulet, who saw in this circular structure a temporal metaphor: it is not so much Jerard who goes around in circles in space; it is time, his own past dancing in a circle around him.

The imperfect

Let us go back to the first sentence in the story: “Je sortais d’un théâtre.” We have considered the implications of that “Je” and of that “théâtre,” now let us consider the “sortais.” The verb is in the imperfect.

The imperfect is a tense of duration and is often iterative. It always expresses an action not fully completed, and all we need is a tiny contextual hint to establish whether the action is also iterative, that is to say, is carried out several times. The fact is that Jerard came out of that theater every evening, and had been doing so for a year.*

I apologize for the apparent tautology, but the imperfect is so called because it is in fact imperfect: it moves us to a time before the present in which we are speaking, but it does not tell us exactly when or how long it went on for. Hence its fascination. Proust said (speaking of Flaubert): “I confess that certain uses of the imperfect indicative—of this cruel tense which presents life to us as something ephemeral and at the same time passive, which at the very moment it summons up our actions stamps them with illusion, and obliterates them in the past without leaving us, like the simple past does, the consolation of activity—have remained for me an inexhaustible source of mysterious sadness.” *

All the more reason why in Sylvie the imperfect is the tense that forces us to lose our sense of the confines of time. It is used with apparent generosity, and yet with mathematical caution, so much so that in the changes from the first to the second version of Sylvie Nerval adds one imperfect but eliminates another. In the first chapter, when he discovers that he is rich, Jerard writes, in 1853, “Que dirait maintenant, pensai-je, le jeune homme de tout à l’heure” (What would the young man of a few moments ago say now, I thought) and then “Je frémis de cette pensée” (I trembled at that thought). In 1854 he corrects this to “pensais-je”(I was thinking). In fact this is correct, since the imperfect appears in those lines to present us with the narrator’s thoughts, a stream of thoughts that lasts in time: Jerard dreams for a certain number of seconds (or minutes) of the idea of a possible conquest of the actress, without making up his mind. Then, suddenly, and only then, with the return to the simple past ( “Je frémis”), he definitively rejects that fantasy.

On the other hand, at the end of chapter 2, in 1853 Adrienne “repartait” (was leaving again), whereas in 1854 Adrienne “repartit”(left again). Rereading the passage one sees that up until that point everything has taken place in the imperfect, almost as if to make the whole scene more nebulous, and only at that point something definitely happens that belongs not to the dreamworld but to reality. The next day Adrienne disappears. Her departure is abrupt and definitive. In fact, aside from the ambiguous oneiric episode in chapter 7, this is the last time Jerard sees her—or at least has the good fortune to be near her.

In any case, the reader is well warned right from the first chapter, where in the space of the first five paragraphs there are no fewer than fifty-three imperfects out of a total of sixty or so verb forms. In those first five paragraphs everything that is described happened habitually, for some time, every evening. Then in the sixth paragraph someone “said” something, or, rather, someone asks Jerard “who it is” that he goes to the theater to see. And Jerard “said” her name. The nebulous temporality becomes more concrete, becomes solid at a precise moment: the story starts at that point, or, rather, that point signals Time1, from which Jerard (who is recalling this in TimeN) makes the story of his journey start.

The extent to which the imperfect nebulizes time can be seen in the Châalis chapter. The person who intervenes twice in the present indicative (the first time to describe the abbey, the second to tell us that in summoning up those details the speaker wonders whether they are real or not) is Nerval—or Jerard in TimeN. Everything else is in the imperfect—except where syntax will not permit it. The analysis of the verb tenses in this chapter would require too many grammatical subtleties. But all we need to do is reread the chapter several times, listening attentively to the music of those tenses, and we realize why not only we but also Nerval himself hesitates to say whether this is a nightmare or a memory.

The use of the imperfect takes us back to the distinction between story, plot, and discourse. The choice of a verb tense takes place on the level of discourse, but the vagueness thus established at the discursive level impinges on our capacity to reconstruct the story by way of the plot. This is why critics are unable to agree on the sequence of events, at least so far as the first seven chapters are concerned. In order to extricate ourselves from the tangle of tenses, let us label as “the first dance” the one that takes place in front of the castle with Adrienne (perhaps at Orry), as “the second dance” the one at the festival with the swan (the first trip to Loisy), and as “the third dance” the one Jerard gets to just as it ends, after his journey in the carriage.

When does the episode of the night at Châalis happen? Before or after the first visit to Loisy? Again, remember that we are not dealing with a forensic problem here. It is the unconscious reply to this question that the reader is seeking, the one that plays the greatest role in creating the mist-effect.

One critic (and this shows just how powerful the mist-effect is) has even advanced the hypothesis that Châalis comes before the first dance on the lawn—on the grounds that in chapter 2, paragraph 5, it is said that after the dance “we would never see her again.” But this cannot be before the dance, and for three reasons: first, Jerard recognizes Adrienne at Châalis, whereas he sees her for the first time at the dance (and this is confirmed in the third chapter); second, the young girl is already “transfigured” by her monastic vocation that night, whereas in the second chapter we were told that she would devote herself to the religious life only after the dance; and third, the scene of the first dance is described at the beginning of the fourth chapter as a childhood memory, and one cannot see