PROSPER MÉRIMÉE, IMPERSONAL ANALYST
Among French masters of the short-story, Prosper Mérimée easily holds rank in the first group. Both personality and genius are his, and both well repay scrutiny.
Stendhal has given us a picture of Mérimée as a “young man in a gray frock-coat, very ugly, and with a turned-up nose.... This young man had something insolent and extremely unpleasant about him. His eyes, small and without expression, had always the same look, and this look was ill-natured.... Such was my first impression of the best of my present friends.”
An examination of at least eight several portraits of Mérimée indicates that Stendhal’s picture is far from flattering, yet no one ever charged Mérimée with being pretty.
Our author was born in Paris, September 28, 1803. His father, Jean François, was a cultivated artist and a writer of some ability. While professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, the elder Mérimée married Anne Moreau, a pupil. She was a successful painter of children, and often kept them in quiet pose by telling them stories. Her grandmother, Madame de Beaumont, had long before endeared herself to children of all time by writing “Beauty and the Beast.” The Mérimée home naturally attracted the artists and celebrities of many lands, so that Prosper was reared in an air of refinement and inspiration.
Versatile from childhood, Mérimée took to drawing like a fine-arts pupil, passed through college, was successful in his law examinations, and at an early age took up literature as a vocation.
His career was seconded by many journeys abroad, where he served his country particularly as man of letters, art critic, and archæologist. At home he received important public recognition, notably membership in the French Academy and appointment as a Senator of France. This latter honor evidenced the warm personal esteem of the Empress Eugénie, whom he had known as a girl in Spain, and at whose court—in the reign of Napoleon III—he was received as an intimate rather than as a courtier. Notwithstanding his reticence, everywhere his friends were many and distinguished, for scarcely any other Frenchman ever labored so brilliantly in capacities collateral with literature and yet attained to such a pinnacle of many-sided authorship. He died at Cannes, September 23, 1870, lacking five days of rounding out his sixty-seventh year.
Those who would know somewhat of Mérimée’s spirit must read his Letters to an Unknown Woman—letters covering thirty-nine years of his life. For the first nine years the correspondents never met, but when at length they did, it was to love; and though during the succeeding thirty years the affection cooled, there never failed a solid attachment, and the last letter to his Inconnue was penned but two hours before his death. True, in these epistles the author is always the literary artist expressing the moods of a man and a lover, and so is never to be taken quite unawares, yet all his traits are disclosed with sufficient openness to show the real man.
And this real man, who was he? An alert student of history, who yet was so fascinated by its anecdotal phases that he cared not at all for the large philosophy of events in sequence; a linguist who early delved into Greek and Latin, knew English well enough to memorize long passages from the poets, spoke Castilian Spanish as well as several dialects, and translated Russian—Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenieff—with rare ability; an epicure in travel, keen for the curious and the novel; a connoisseur in art and archæology of sufficient distinction to warrant his appointment as the national “Inspector of Monuments;” a prejudiced scorner of priests and religion, yet bitterly distrustful of his own inner light; an orderly man, systematic even in his indulgences; a pagan in refined sensualism, which he always checked before its claims impinged too largely upon other domains; an aloof spirit, ironical and cold, yet capable of the warm friendship that made Stendhal happy for two days by receiving one of Mérimée’s letters, constant enough to pour out his best at the feet of his Unknown for more than half a lifetime, and so gentle as to crave with the tender heart of a father the love of little children.
The sum of all this is Enigma. We are not sure which is the real man; but this we know: his was a tender, susceptible heart beating under an outer garment of ironical coldness. To love deeply was to endure pain, to follow impulse was to court trouble, to cherish enthusiasms was to delude the mind—so he schooled himself to appear impassive and blasé. How much of this frosty withdrawal was genuine and how much a protective mask, no man can say.
Mérimée’s literary methods reflected his singularly composite personality, yet the author is not apparent in his work. He delighted to tell his tales in the impersonal, matter-of-fact manner of the casual traveller who had picked up a good story and passed it on just as it was told to him.
“They contain,” writes Professor Van Steenderen, “no lengthy descriptions. There are no reflections, dissertations, or explanations in them. They bring out in relief only the permanent features of a given situation, features interesting and intelligible to men of other ages and climes. They are lucid and well constructed. Their plots turn about a simple action with unique effect. Their style is alert, urbane, discreet, and rich, seeking its effect only through concrete and simple means. They deal but very slightly with lyrical emotion, they deal with passions and the will.”
Mérimée’s literary career began at the age of twenty-two, when he published a collection of eight of his short plays purporting to be translated from the Spanish. His portrait, disguised as a Spanish actress, serves as a frontispiece. He perpetuated a similar hoax two years later when he issued a volume of pseudo-Illyrian poems, “translated into French.” These brilliant jokes gulled the literary world as completely as did Chatterton.
His historical fiction, pure history, dramas, criticisms, essays, and works on art and archæology, we must pass. His shorter fiction claims attention now.
“Colomba”—a novelette in length, but a long short-story in structure—is the story of a Corsican vendetta, followed to the end by the heroine (from whom the story takes its title) with a wild ferocity tempered with a queer sort of piety. Mérimée’s fatalism underlies the whole—circumstances control the will, chance decides the brigand or the benefactor, virtue and crime are mere accidents.
When Mérimée published “Colomba,” in 1840, he was at the height of his genius, and notwithstanding the enervating philosophy in which the romance is steeped, it remains one of the most powerfully dramatic stories ever written—both terrible and sweet.
Of his twenty-some briefer fictions—mostly tales in form—eight at least are brilliant examples of the story-teller’s art, and all show marks of distinction. Six were published in one fruitful year—1829: “Mateo Falcone,” “The Vision of Charles XI,” “The Taking of the Redoubt,” “Tamango,” “Federigo,” and “The Pearl of Toledo.”
“Tamango” is a fine specimen of Mérimée’s artistic irony, yet underneath are compassion, and hatred of injustice. As does most of the author’s work, this tale reveals his tendency to tragedy, even his love for picturing the gruesome. There is in all literature no more terrible picture of the slave-trade and its revolting consequent evils.
“Mateo Falcone” is a technically perfect short-story. Mateo is a well-to-do sheep-raiser living in the plateau country of Corsica, whose thickets were often the resort of fugitives from justice. One day Mateo and his wife set out early to visit one of their flocks, leaving the little son, Fortunato, at home. Several hours later a bandit, limping painfully from a wound received from the pursuing soldiery, claims sanctuary as a Corsican and protection because of his friendship for Mateo. Fortunato hesitates, but at sight of a five-franc piece hides the man under a haystack. Soon the soldiers come, but threats cannot make the boy betray the bandit. A silver watch, however, proves an effective bribe. Just as the wounded bandit is dragged from the haystack, Mateo returns and learns the truth. When the soldiers have gone, bearing their contemptuous prisoner on a litter, the father takes out little Fortunato and, after giving him time to say a final prayer, shoots him as the first traitor in the family.
This, says Walter Pater, is “perhaps the cruellest story in the world.” But it is not all cruelty. So skilfully, so sincerely, does the narrator make us feel the whole spirit of the scene, the people, the crisis, that we are prepared to witness the awful penalty for violating the Corsican code of sanctuary. But oh, the hopelessness of that mother, as she stoically, yet with breaking heart, sees the inevitable tragedy closing in upon those whom she loves!
“The Venus of Ille” the author thought to be his best story. It is notable—as all of Mérimeé’s stories are—for its perfect local color, as well as for its subtle air of the weird. It is one of the classic “ghost” stories of the world—a tale of supreme distinction. It is also, structurally, the author’s most perfect short-story.
M. de Peyrehorade unearths a bronze statue of a woman, which is thereafter known as The Venus of Ille. From the beginning this statue is feared by the peasantry, for when it was dug up it fell upon and broke the leg of a workman. Peyrehorade’s son Alphonse is betrothed to a wealthy girl. On their wedding day, while playing tennis, he removes from his hand the bride’s diamond ring and places it on the finger of the statue. On arriving at the home of the bride-to-be, he discovers the absence of the ring, but replaces it with another, without mentioning the incident. After the wedding he returns with his bride to his father’s home and tries to remove the ring from the hand of the Venus; but her fingers are now bent and he cannot. That night the terrified bride hears the Venus enter their bed-chamber and lie down beside her. Thinking it to be her husband, she makes no comment. But presently the husband does come in and lies down upon the bed. Whereupon the bronze Venus crushes him to death in her embrace and then moves away as she came.
In “Arsene Guillot” (1844), Mérimée’s masterpiece of pathos, he has given freer rein to his sympathies, and the result is a tenderly moving tale illustrating the virtue of tolerance.
In early manhood Mérimée spent long stretches in Spain, there absorbing rich material for his stories. “Carmen”—the story on which Bizet founded his opera—is the greatest of these. It was published in 1845, and in length is almost a novelette.
Don José Lizzarrabengoa, Navarrese, and corporal in a cavalry regiment, meets at Seville the gypsy, Carmen. While taking her to prison for a murderous assault on another woman, he is induced to connive at her escape, and is punished by being reduced to the ranks. Through jealous infatuation for her, he kills his lieutenant, and joins a band of smugglers of which Carmen is the leading spirit. In a duel with Garcia, her rom, or husband, Don José kills Garcia, and becomes in his turn the rom of the fascinating gypsy. Jealous of every man who sees her, Don José offers to forget everything if she will go with him to America. She refuses—for the sake of another lover, as he believes—and he threatens to kill her if she persists. She answers that it is so written, and that she has long known it, but that “free Carmen has been, and free she will always be.” Don José does kill her, buries her in the woods, and rides to Cordova, where he delivers himself to the authorities.
But it is now time to look particularly at one of Mérimée’s earlier tales—written when he was but twenty-six—“The Taking of the Redoubt.”
Technically it is a tale, with the picture-phrases of the sketch. It is a marvellous brief story rather than a marvellous short-story, which, as I have before remarked, must exhibit more plot, more complication, with its consequent dénouement, than is found in either the tale or the sketch. As a work of art, it ranks with the author’s most vivid stories. In the memorable phrase of Walter Pater, “Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon’s mouth.”
Before reading the story itself in translation, some explanatory words may be helpful. It is interesting to note the device which Mérimée uses to add reality to his narrative—he tells us that the story, the characters, the place, the fight, are real. Even those who stand in the wings, flitting across the stage but once as if to say, “I am flesh and blood, and not a mere stuffed figure like the doll whose only pains were in her sawdust”—even they have names and personalities dimly veiled under the initial and the dash.
Mérimée’s friend, the “military man” from whom he got the story, is Henri Marie Beyle—who called himself de Stendhal. Stendhal was a somewhat prolific author, but it was La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) that brought him fame. As a romantic tragi-comedy, dealing with Italy in the Napoleonic era, it is worth a reading, but particularly because the so-called Épisode de Waterloo (in chapters 3 and 4) reveals the measurable debt which Mérimée owed to his friend.
Stendhal was indeed “a military man.” He first smelled powder in the Marengo campaign (1800), and served long in Napoleon’s armies. But he was actually present in 1812 at the assault upon Cheverino, in the Moscow campaign, and doubtless he afterward poured its dramatic story red-hot into the soul of Mérimée.
In another detail also Mérimée departs from fact—Stendhal died in Paris in 1842 of apoplexy, and not of “a fever in Greece;” but surely that is a mild variation for a fictionist. “The 4th September” is also true to the actual, since the battle of Borodino took place on the 7th, and the arrival at Moscow on the 14th, 1812. “General B——” is General Berthier, chief-of-staff for Napoleon in the Moscow campaign. “Madame de B——” has been identified as Madame de Boigne, the intimate of Madame Récamier, and a resident of the rue de Provence. In her salon Mérimée read aloud many of his stories before publication. Other critics suggest that “Madame B——” is Madame (la comtesse) de Beaulaincourt, and support this contention by referring to a collection of eleven letters addressed to this noble dame by Mérimée, and later published. Finally, “General C——” is that famous Napoleonic soldier, Jean Dominique Compans, who actually commanded the 57th and the 61st regiments at Cheverino.
But a volume might be written on the art of this master story-teller, on the life-experiences from which he drew his plots, and on the glowing praises which his work has called forth for three-quarters of a century. Doubtless, however, his own work will now serve better than further pages of introduction.