With illuminated Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855) wrote his particular Praise of Folly, that book, in his own words, "not everyone can write." Purpose of course shocking, because perhaps the least likely to do is say it's the Gerard de Nerval himself, who has known since 1842 the bankruptcy of their mental health accompanied by successive internments aggravated after his return from the East in 1849 .

On his return to Paris, beset both by melancholy and by growing economic problems, it is forced to give new impetus to his literary career. They'll be five years of literary creation frantic pace of its progressive deterioration, you strain at the end of Nerval is hanging on a fence in an alley of Paris. They will write his most famous works. Among them is the most neglected, but not least: Illuminated whose publication dates from 1852. A perfectly sensible book about some more than multifarious follies.

The it illuminated a book conceived as a portrait gallery where each of the characters portrayed are mixed into a strange amalgam the "extravagant and unknown philosopher," the "mad literary" and "precursor of socialism" is. Characters all unusual, founders of brotherhoods, members of secret societies, exalted mystic, excessive social reformers and writers (for example, Restif de la Bretonne, who wrote more than two hundred works of considerable size); lost, passionate and frenzied lives, they are going to give the opportunity Gérad de Nerval both of sympathizing as zany and ironic about great destinations, but also to punctuate his political thinking and his literary vocation.

Book that will be located in an unjust background because of the enormity of that immediately after Nerval be published. In he turns his enormous art of literary subtlety with pages sometimes irregular (in some cases translates directly from outside sources, such as Germany) but many times master, as one of his most celebrated chapters - "The confidences of Nicholas' - where, for many, Nerval leads to a high point of perfection poetic narrative libertine eighteenth century.

In Enlightened it is entered as a museum.