between the first and the last chapter, the second and the thirteenth, etc., even though the correspondences do not follow this rule precisely). Here are the most glaring examples:

EUPHORIC DYSPHORIC

1. Archery as mythical evocation 14. Archery as children’s game
2. Adrienne’s graceful farewell, as she heads for the monastic life 13. Aurélie’s graceful farewell, woman of the world
3. The kiss as mystic experience 8. The kiss is merely affectionate
4. All thought they were in paradise 4. This is simply an old genteel festival
5. Jerard is the only boy at the dance 4. Each boy has a girl partner
6. Broken clock: promise of time to be recovered 12. Broken clock: memory of lost time
   5 Solitary, enchanted walk 9. Solitary, depressed walk
7. Uplifting walk and visit to her aunt 10. The aunt is dead, embarrassed departure for Châalis
8. Apparition of Adrienne singing 11. Vague recollection of Adrienne; Sylvie sings

In fact, the disturbing Châalis chapter breaks the symmetry and separates the first six chapters from the remaining seven. On the one hand we have in this seventh chapter a reversal of the ball in chapter 4: this is an aristocratic celebration as opposed to the people’s festival on the island (there are no young people except on the stage: Jerard and Sylvie’s brother creep in only as intruders), it is set in a closed space as opposed to the open space of Cythera, Adrienne’s apocalyptic song contrasts with the sweet song she sang while still an adolescent, and finally, this is a funereal celebration as opposed to a Pervigilium Veneris, the return of his obsession with Adrienne as opposed to the reconciliation and conquest of Sylvie…
The chapter contains themes from the other chapters as well, but they are dreamily unresolved and neutralized. It cites without any obvious reason the archery contest, the clock, a kind of dance-spectacle, a crown that is a halo of gilt cardboard, and above all a swan. Many critics imply that the swan is not just an emblem, a coat of arms engraved or sculpted (as the heraldic term “éployé” would suggest), but a real swan crucified on the door. This seems excessive, even though in a dream everything is possible, but whatever it is, this swan is halfway between the living, triumphant swan of chapter 4, and the one that is now absent in chapter 14.

There has been talk of “degradation rituals,” but one does not need to uncover all the symmetries in order to detect them. The correspondences work almost unbeknownst to the reader; each return of a motif that has already been sounded causes a sense of déjà vu, but we notice only that something that we thought we had been given has been taken from us.

Going Round and Round

Mist-effects, labyrinth-effects: Poulet has spoken of “metamorphoses of the circle.” Perhaps critics have seen more circles than there really are in Sylvie, like the magic circle of the stage, the concentric circles of the dance on the lawn (the dance on the “pelouse” framed by the trees, the one that involved the circle of young girls and finally, in the whirlwind of the dance, as though in a close-up, the long gold circles of the girl’s hair), and in the second festival at Loisy the three circles of the pool, the island, and the temple. But sometimes I feel as if they have underestimated the circles.

For instance, in chapter 9, during the visit to his dead uncle’s house, the word “jardin” is repeated three times in the same paragraph. This is not stylistic slackness: there are three gardens, belonging to three different epochs, but arranged concentrically, if not in terms of spatial perspective at least in a temporal one. It is as if Jerard’s eye saw first his uncle’s garden, in the distance the circle of his childhood, and farther away again the circle of History (the garden as the eternal place of archaeological finds). In a sense this triple garden becomes as it were the miniature model of the whole story, but seen from its final point. From a place revisited in a state of disillusionment (by now the garden is just a mass of weeds), there emerges in the mists of memory first the trace, still well-defined though partially canceled out, of the child’s enchanted universe; and then in the distance, when the garden is the object no longer of Jerard’s eye but of his memory, amid the fragments lined up in his study, one hears the echo of those Roman and Druidic times that had already been summoned up at the beginning of the story.

Finally, it is a circular movement that Jerard carries out in each of his visits to Loisy: first of all leaving from Paris, only to return in the space of a day, then leaving from the village, only to return after crossing pools, woods, and moors.

This circling-round is worthy of an effort that almost amounts to a land survey, but I believe it is worth doing. I decided to draw a map of the places (Table B), more to help myself when translating Sylvie. Even though I kept my eye on several maps of the Valois,* I did not go in for the excessive nuances of meridians and parallels, and I tried to give an approximate visualization of the mutual relationships between villages and forests. However that may be, it should be borne in mind that from Luzarches to Ermenonville is about twenty kilometers as the crow flies, from Ermenonville to Loisy three kilometers, and two from Loisy to Mortefontaine. We are told in chapter 13 that the dance in front of the castle with Adrienne took place near Orry. But I have identified the place of the first and second dance at Loisy as the pools immediately north of Mortefontaine, where the Thève now rises (but at that time apparently it rose between Loisy and Othys).

If you read while also looking at the map, the space comes to look like a bit of chewing gum, changing shape every time you chew it over. It seems impossible that the post carriage takes the route it does to drop Jerard near Loisy, but who knows what the roads were like then?

The route chosen by Sylvie’s brother on the night at Châalis totally throws commentators with a passion for checking topography, and they solve the problems by noting that the boy was tipsy. Did one really have to go through Orry and run parallel to Halatte Forest to get from Loisy to Châalis? Or were the two youths not coming from Loisy? Sometimes it seems that Nerval is reconstructing his own Valois but that he cannot avoid interference from Labrunie’s. The text says that Jerard’s uncle stayed at Montagny, while we know that Labrunie’s uncle stayed at Mortefontaine. Now if we reread carefully, following the table, we see that—if Jerard’s uncle stayed at Montagny—this does not work out, and we are forced to conclude that he stayed at Mortefontaine, or, rather, that—in the Valois of the story—Montagny occupies the exact spot where Mortefontaine is.

Jerard, in chapter 5, says that after the dance he goes with Sylvie and her brother to Loisy, and then “returns” to Montagny. It is obvious that he can return only to Mortefontaine, all the more so since he goes up through a little wood between Loisy and Saint-S (which in reality is Saint-Sulpice, a stone’s throw from Loisy), goes along the edge of Ermenonville forest, clearly to the southwest, and after sleeping sees nearby the walls of the convent of Saint-S, and in the distance La Butte aux Gens d’Armes, the ruins of the abbey of Thiers, the castle of Pontarmè, all of which are places to the northwest of Loisy, where he returns to. He cannot have taken the road for Montagny, which is too far to the east.

At the beginning of chapter 9 Jerard goes from the spot where the dance had taken place to Montagny, then goes back on the road to Loisy, finds everyone asleep, heads toward Ermenonville, leaves the “Desert” on the left, reaches Rousseau’s tomb, and then goes back to Loisy. If he really went to Montagny he would be taking a very long route by crossing the Ermenonville area, and it would be crazy to return to Loisy—crossing back through the Ermenonville area—only then to decide to go up once more toward Ermenonville, and finally return again to Loisy.

In biographical terms this might mean that Nerval had decided to move his uncle’s house to Montagny, and then was not able to maintain the fiction, and kept on thinking (along with Labrunie) of Mortefontaine. But this question must be of only minimal importance to us, unless we are seized by the desire go and take the walk again. The text is there only to make us travel in a Valois where memory is confused with dreams, and its function is to make us lose our bearings.

If that is the case, why make such efforts to reconstruct the map? I think most readers give up, as I did for many years, because it is enough for them to be seized by the fascination of the names. Proust already pointed out how much power names have in this story, and concluded that whoever has read Sylvie cannot fail to feel a thrill when they happen to read the name of Pontarmè on a train schedule. However, he also pointed out that other place-names, equally famous in the history of literature, do not cause the same turmoil in us. Why do the toponyms that appear in this tale become embedded in our mind (or heart) like a musical sequence, a Proustian “petite phrase”?

The