Little Castles of Bohemia: Prose and Poetry

Translated, with an introduction, by Napoleon Jeffries / Illustrations by Alfred Prunaire / October 2025 / 5.375 x 8, 144 pp. / 978-1-962728-08-9 We were young, always gay, often wealthy . . . But I’ve just struck a gloomy chord: our palace is razed to the ground. I trampled through its debris this past autumn. Although Gérard de Nerval had originally intended it to be a small anthology of his early poetry, his 1853 Little Castles of Bohemia ended up as something more. As could be said of all his last works, the book was an effort at stability: worn out from his travels and spells of mental turmoil, and financially impoverished, Nerval gathered his past writing in an attempt at assembling some sort of posterity, at creating a home for the vagabond pieces. The melancholic, wandering castles presented here house pieces gathered from the range of Nerval’s literary life, from his autobiographic reminiscences of the bohemian neighborhood of Le Doyenné (destroyed by Baron Hausmann the year b