« Elle phrasait ! » Ambiguity of the Nervalean phrasing

This article shifts the question of Nerval's taste for popular song to that of his conception of the sentence as a grammatical unit. After having shown, through a study of 19th century melody treatises, how phrasing is indeed a thought of the sentence, we set out to develop the implications of such an aesthetic in terms of punctuation. The stylistic analysis of "La Grand-mère" and Sylvie's first paragraph ultimately opens up perspectives on Nerval's poetic prose.