Nerval was for a time a disciple of Victor Hugo and took part in the Hernani campaign in 1830. He travelled widely and published diversely: plays, novels, stories, essays, travel writing, and indefinable semi-fictional reveries such as Sylvie (1853). He is usually considered an extreme Romantic for his obsessive interest in folklore, the exotic, the primitive, the occult, dandyism, and dreams. He helped revive the sonnet with his difficult but fascinating little collection, Les chimères, from which this one is taken. He was found dead by hanging, most likely a suicide.