But in these dramatic works, the faulty construction of which is apparent even to the reader, the irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is absent. In them he lays on the colour too thickly; it is as the novelist that he really excels. Far more delicate than the irony of his dramas is, for instance, that of the charming little story L'abbé Aubain, a work which proves the versatility of Mérimée's talent, for in it he writes almost like Edmond About, only with much greater elegance. L'abbé Aubain is a short series of letters, some of them written by a lady who supposes herself to be beloved by a young abbé, the rest by the abbé, who jests constrainedly on the subject of the lady's attachment to him. We make the acquaintance of two weak, refined characters, who lie to each other, to themselves, and to the world, and whose little dainty, easy-going passions and counterfeit self-control are the subject of the silent satire of the author.
In a story of this kind there is no narrator; therefore we are no more conscious than in the plays that the author is suppressing himself. The form of irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is most plainly observable where we have a narrator, but know nothing of him except that he has no share in the emotions he describes. Mérimée's method, which is determined by his natural reserve, is to increase the effect of the story he is telling by an irony betraying itself in minute traits; he either with a little curl of the lip allows the touching incidents to speak for themselves, or he exhibits the painful, the revolting, or the passionate, in a frame of cold, indifferent surroundings.
In that little masterpiece, Le Vase étrusque, the only one of his stories in which he treats a quite modern theme sympathetically, he tells the story of two young beings who love each other secretly. We hear the young man, who has just returned from a night rendezvous, talking to himself:
"How happy I am!" he keeps on saying to himself. "At last I have found the heart which understands mine! Yes, it is my ideal that I have found—friend and mistress in one.... What character! What passion! ... No, she has never loved before!" And as vanity intrudes itself into every earthly concern, his next thought is: "She is the most beautiful woman in Paris;" and in imagination he retraces all her charms.
The narrative continues in this strain for some time before Mérimée interrupts himself with the remark that a happy lover is almost as tedious as an unhappy one. Then, when the relation between the two lovers has reached its most perfect stage, when Saint-Clair's momentary but fatal fit of jealousy of his beloved's past has resolved itself into a mere nothing, a mere misunderstanding, and we have witnessed a love scene which the most subtly tender of writers could hardly surpass, a scene in which tears of repentance mingle with smiles and kisses, how do we learn, six lines farther on in the story, that everything is at an end, that Saint-Clair was killed the following morning in a duel? We hear of it as we hear of such things in real life:
"Well," said Roquantin to Colonel Beaujeu when he met him at Tartoni's in the evening; "is this news true?"
"Only too true," answered the Colonel, looking very sad.
"Tell me how it happened."
"Simply enough. Saint-Clair told me that he was wrong, but that he would rather be shot by Thémines than make an apology to him. I could not but approve. Thémines wanted to draw lots for the first shot, but Saint-Clair insisted upon his firing first. Thémines fired. I saw Saint-Clair wheel round and then fall, dead. I have more than once seen a soldier, after he had been mortally wounded, turn round in the same curious way before he fell."
"How extraordinary!" said Roquantin. "And Thémines, what did he do?"