And she let loose a kick so terrible, so terrible that at Pampérigouste itself one could see the smoke: a cloud of blond smoke in which fluttered an ibis plume—all that was left of the ill-fated Tistet Védène.
Mules’ kicks are not ordinarily so appalling; but then this was a papal mule; and besides, think of it! she had saved it up for seven years. There is no finer example of an ecclesiastical grudge.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] The County of Avignon.
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.