“Où sa main l’entrainait” The specter of the secondary in La Main enchantée

This article examines the issue of secondarity in a work considered secondary in the Nervalian corpus—his first prose story, published in 1832 with the title “La Main de Gloire, histoire macaronique.” A trace of the ephemeral camaraderie of the bousingo, this tale, dominated by self-parody and denial, suggests a young Nerval struggling with the concerns of his generation, a brilliant representative of the “school of disenchantment.”