Poet, translator and essayist, Gérard de Nerval (whose actual name was Gérard Labrunie) was an important literary figure in the movement of French Romanticism. His mental health was fragile and he suffered various breakdowns, but he remained convinced that his unusual pet understood him and sympathised. His pet was a lobster, named Thibault, and he regularly walked the lobster through the streets of Paris, using a blue silk ribbon as a lead.
When he was laughed at over his strange pet, Nerval replied: “Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog … or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animals that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn’t mad.” On one occasion, he was walking his pet when he was accosted by the local Mayor, who accused him of raiding the lobster nets at the harbour. But the truth was that Nerval had saved Thibault from a fisherman’s net on a beach, and the certain fate of death in a restaurant’s pot of boiling water. However, lobsters don’t survive for more than about half an hour out of water, so the Parisian walks must have been short ones and, one imagines, highly stressful experiences for poor Thibault.
Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 1855) was an early animal rights activist and wrote about animals in some of his poems. Sadly, he took his own life when his mental state grew too confused.
Selected links for relevant websites, books, movies, videos, and more. Some of these links lead to protected content on this website, learn more about that here.