The news of Gérard de Nerval's suicide on 14 January 1855 stunned the literary and artistic community of Paris as had no other writer's death in recent memory. The shock registered by acquaintances and journalists over the following weeks was inspired not by the belief that a great poet had been taken from them but by sentiments of pity, shame, and perhaps guilt that a longtime friend, that "gentle Gérard," clearly delusional, penniless, and without shelter on one of the coldest nights of the winter, had hanged himself in a dark and sinister alley in the heart of the resplendent capital of light. Through their reactions in the press, articles, poems, and later memoirs, they created an enduring Romantic myth of a desolate wanderer who was incapable of harming anyone or anything; who would at times converse quietly about theosophy and the occult sciences, at other...