Abstract: What kind of madness is the eccentricity of the poet who “believes in his fable”? Fantasy and humour are perhaps what makes it possible to transform life into a work of art and the anguish of death into a “dream hatched from thought”. The poetics of the author of Ollivier and LeDiable amoureux is considered here as a key to the reading of Nerval’s poetics in Les Illuminés and is related to the particular forms of Nervalian identification.
