“The poet who believes in his fable” Madness and fantasy in Nerval’s “Jacques Cazotte”

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 Le Diable 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.