"Oh! what every one does on such occasions. He threw his pistol on the ground with an exclamation of regret. He flung it with such force that the trigger broke. It is an English pistol, a Manton. I don't believe he will find a gunsmith in the whole of Paris who can make him as good a one."
By describing the sympathy of friends, not in the manner of sentimental authors, but as it expresses itself in real life, Mérimée brings out the passionate sentiment of the relation between the lovers in full force; the neutral tint of the frame enhances the effect of the picture. If the art of icing champagne had not been known before Mérimée's day, he would have invented it.
Let me give one or two more examples of Mérimée's gift of keeping entirely aloof from the emotion which he portrays, and which he excites in the reader. Take the passage in L'Enlèvement de la Redoute which describes the main attack. "We were soon at the foot of the redoubt. The palisades had been shattered and the earth torn up by our balls. The soldiers rushed at these ruins with shouts of: 'Vive l'Empereur!' which were louder than one would have expected from men who had been shouting so long." The narrator in this case is not Mérimée himself, but an officer who is relating his first experience of a fight; this officer is, however, near of kin to his creator; he does not share the ardour of the fighting soldiers. Instead of praising their enthusiasm for Napoleon as patriotic or courage-inspiring, he coolly comments upon the strength of their lungs.
It is not at all surprising that this style, this tone, which adds so remarkably to the impression of the reality of the thing described, should have been again and again taken as a sign of the author's want of feeling. As a matter of fact it is no more so than his choice of horrible subjects is a proof of his cruelty. On the contrary, the irony of the style is often only the transparent veil covering compassion and indignation. Study this irony in the little tale Tamango, where to the superficial reader the mere choice of subject would be apt to suggest the author's love of the revolting—for what is more horrible than the slave trade and the ill-usage of slaves, or than shipwreck, starvation, and murder? And all this, moreover, told with an ironic smile!
But we feel what the irony signifies when we come upon such a passage as the following:
"The captain, to ratify the bargain, shook hands with the more than half-intoxicated negro chief; and the slaves were immediately delivered to the French sailors, who quickly exchanged the long wooden forks with which the negroes had fettered them, for collars and handcuffs of iron—a proof of the superiority of European civilization."
And its real quality is still more distinctly perceptible in the lines which tell of the captain's attempt to make the pretty negress obedient by flogging her:
"With these words the captain went below, sent for Aycha, and tried to console her; but neither caresses nor blows (for a man loses patience at last) made the beautiful negress amenable."
The cold composure with which the fact is recognised that such is human nature, and that such things happen, actually heightens the impression of indignation produced by the deed of violence. We do not lay the book aside unmoved. We perceive that what at first seemed coldness, is but the petrified eruption of the inward fire of the artist's soul. We comprehend that an emotion underlies the sober, severe style of these tales, and that it is this emotion which gives them their impressiveness.
Of all Mérimée's stories, Arsène Guillot is the one in which the ironical style of the narrative and a strength of feeling which has freed itself from the bonds of prejudice, are most perfectly fused together. The conventional virtue of the pious fashionable lady is contrasted with the absolute ignorance of the doctrines of Christianity and morality displayed by the poor girl whose own mother has sold her. In a moment of despair Arsène jumps out of the window and breaks her leg and several of her ribs. The action of the story passes in her sick-room. The usual irony in the relation of the events prevents compassion and emotion from overstepping the bounds of artistic moderation. Towards the close, however, in the description of Arsène's death, the heart is permitted to speak unrestrainedly, and its simple language communicates a charm to the dying grisette hardly inferior to that which transfigures De Musset's dying Bernerette. At the very end artistic irony again asserts itself. For the line: "Pauvre Arsène, elle prie pour nous!" traced in pencil in a woman's delicate handwriting on Arsène's gravestone, informs us in all its brevity that the austere lady has yielded to the same temptation as the ignorant child, that after Arsène died like a heroine, her patroness inherited her lover. Irony is in this case almost too coarse a word. Expressions are lacking to describe these delicate shades. That faintly ironical pencilled line contains in its six words a Mériméan, that is to say, a laconic, sermon on tolerance.