Sylvie: Souvenirs Du Valois

Sylvie (1853) is a novella by French Romanticist Gérard de Nerval. It was first published in the periodical La Revue des Deux Mondes in 1853, and as a book in Les Filles du feu in 1854, just a few months before Nerval killed himself in January 1855. Sylvie is often considered Nerval's prose masterpiece, and has been a favorite of Marcel Proust, André Breton, Joseph Cornell and Umberto Eco. Harold Bloom included it in The Western Canon (1994). The story is about a hero's love for three women, all of whom he loses; a hymn to unattainable, unrequited love.