The generals came in, and the curtain of the tent was raised so that the fresh air of the morning might blow on the face of the dying. The entrance faced east, and the view to the horizon was unbroken.
"Listen, friends," Julian began, and his voice was low, but clear. "My hour is come, and like an honest debtor, I am not sorry to give back my life to nature, and in my soul is neither pain nor fear. I have tried to keep my soul stainless; I have aspired to ends not ignoble. Most of our earthly affairs are in the hands of destiny. We must not resist her. Let the Galileans triumph. We shall conquer later on!"
The morning clouds were growing red, and the first beam of the sun washed over the rim of the horizon. The dying man held his face towards the light, with closed eyes.
Then his head fell back, and the last murmur came from his half-open lips, "Helios! Receive me unto thyself!"
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
Carmen
Novelist, archaeologist, essayist, and in all three departments one of the greatest masters of French style of his century, Prosper Mérimée was born in Paris on September 23, 1803. The son of a painter, Mérimée was intended for the law, but at the age of twenty-two achieved fame as the author of a number of plays purporting to be translations from the Spanish. From that time until his death at Cannes on September 23, 1870, a brilliant series of plays, essays, novels, and historical and archaeological works poured from his fertile pen. Altogether he wrote about a score of tales, and it is on these and on his "Letters to an Unknown" that Mérimée's fame depends. His first story to win universal recognition was "Colombo," in 1830. Seventeen years later appeared his "Carmen, the Power of Love," of which Taine, in his celebrated essay on the work, says, "Many dissertations on our primitive savage methods, many knowing treatises like Schopenhauer's on the metaphysics of love and death, cannot compare to the hundred pages of 'Carmen.'"
I.--I Meet Don José
One day, wandering in the higher part of the plain of Cachena, near Cordova, harassed with fatigue, dying of thirst, burned by an overhead sun, I perceived, at some distance from the path I was following, a little green lawn dotted with rushes and reeds. It proclaimed to me the neighbourhood of a spring, and I saw that a brook issued from a narrow gorge between two lofty spurs of the Sierra de Cabra.