Green Monster – by Gérard de Nerval

The poet, mystic, underground scholar, hermeticist, and journalist Gérard de Nerval was one of the prime motivators of the Romanticist avant-garde in France, by both his deeply experimental writing and his tireless activity as an organiser, as well as his stridently eccentric lifestyle (famously represented by the legend of the pet lobster he would take out for walks along the Paris street). His example played a formative role in the Bohemian subculture of Paris.

This offbeat ghost story combines his interests in Gothic fiction, the phantasmagoria of the German Romantics, philology and argot (vernacular and subcultural slang), and medieval local history and folk culture. 

Set around the corner from the former headquarters of the Bouzingo group which Nerval had co-founded around 1830, the tale draws on actual local folklore to both celebrate and subvert both the charmingly pedantic tone of antiquarian scholarship and the traditional form of the supernatural fable, weaving into it increasingly weird threads of Romanticist grotesquerie and irony.