Gerard de Nerval was born Gerard Labrunie in 1808, in Paris, the son of an army doctor. A precocious poet, he published a number of volumes of political verse during his adolescence and gained fame at the age of nineteen for his translation of Goethe's Faust. He was one of the young Romantics gathered around Victor Hugo, and served for a long time as a ghost-writer of Alexandre Dumas. Between 1852 and 1855, in a state of ever-mounting financial and mental disarray, Nerval published the bulk of the work on which his fame rests: The Illuminati, October Nights, Castles in Bohemia, The Daughters of Fire, Sylvie, The Chimeras, and Aurelia. Nerval died on 26 January 1855, by his own hand.