[1] For example: "Julien's answers to these objections were very satisfactory as far as the actual words were concerned, but the tone in which he spoke and the ill-concealed fire which gleamed in his eyes made Monsieur Chélan uneasy. Yet we must not augur too unfavourably of Julien. He had found the very expressions which a crafty hypocrite would have used. This, at his age, was not bad. As to tone and gestures, it is to be remembered that he had lived among peasants and had had no opportunity of studying the great masters. Hardly had he had the privilege of seeing these said gentlemen than he became as admirable in the matter of gesture as in that of language." On another occasion Julien is dining with a brutally cruel governor of a prison. He feels ashamed of the company he is in; he says to himself that he too may some day attain to such a position, but only by committing the same base actions to which his companions have accustomed themselves. "O Napoleon!" he ejaculates, "how glorious was thy day, when men rose to fortune by the dangers of the battle-field! But think of doing it by basely adding to the sufferings of the unfortunate!" Beyle adds: "I confess that the weakness which Julien betrays in this monologue gives me a poor opinion of him. He would be a fit colleague of those gloved conspirators who aim at completely changing the destinies of a great country, but are determined not to have even the smallest scratch to reproach themselves with."
[2] The following consecutive sentences will show at a glance how well and how badly Beyle could write: "Ce raisonnement, si juste en apparence, acheva de jeter Mathilde hors d'elle-même. Cette âme altière, mais saturée de toute cette prudence sèche, qui passe dans le grand monde pour peindre fidèlement le cœur humain, n'était pas faite pour comprendre si vite le bonheur de se moquer de toute prudence qui peut être si vif pour une âme ardente." One has an idea what the writer means, although the sentence, apart from its clumsy construction, is not even logically correct. But immediately upon it follows one which astonishes us equally by its profundity and its wit: "Dans les hautes classes de la société de Paris, où Mathilde avait vécu, la passion ne peut que bien rarement se dépouiller de la prudence, et c'est du cinquième étage qu'on se jette par la fenêtre."
[3] The best appreciations of Beyle are Balzac's criticism of La Chartreuse; Taine's of Rouge et Noir; Mérimée's notice in the introduction to Beyle's Correspondance inédite, somewhat amplified in Portraits historiques; Colomb's biographical essay; Sainte-Beuve's two articles in the Causeries du Lundi, T. 9; Bussiere's article in Revue des deux Mondes of Jan. 15,1843; Zola's in Les Romanciers naturalists; and Paul Bourget's in Revue Nouvelle, August 15, 1882. Alfred de Bougy's Stendhal is mere plagiarism and self-assertion.
[XXI]
MÉRIMÉE
Readers of the present generation—familiar with Victor Hugo's contemptuous allusion to Mérimée in L'histoire d'une Crime, and apt to see in Hugo only the rhetorically poetic republican, in Mérimée the polished, sarcastic secretary of the Courts of Love of the Second Empire—find it difficult to realise that these two men, whom literary and political antipathies in course of time separated so widely, belonged in their youth to the same camp, and associated not merely on peaceful but on friendly terms. On one of the bright spring days of Romanticism, the all-seeing sun beheld the studiously correct author of Mateo Falcone_in shirt-sleeves and apron in Victor Hugo's kitchen, where, surrounded by the whole family, he gave the cook a successful demonstration in the art of preparing macaroni à l'italienne. And we know that on a certain festive evening Hugo, possibly roused to enthusiasm by that same excellent macaroni, made the applicable and flattering anagram, "M. Première Prose," out of the name Prosper Mérimée.[1]
Victor Hugo himself, at a later period, would have utterly denied the applicability of the anagram (when Mérimée's sober style happened to be praised in his hearing, he ejaculated, "The sobriety of a weak stomach!"), but it may safely be maintained that it exactly expresses the opinion of the oldest living generation of Frenchmen. In the estimation of the elderly cultured man of the world, no style surpasses Prosper Mérimée's.