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Jean Jullien, the inventor of the phrase "Une tranche de la vie," endeavoured to give plays without formal beginning or end, unconsciously, perhaps, tried to carry out a desire of Merimée's to write a play in respect of which the audience needs no knowledge of antecedent facts; but his success in more senses than one was only partial.
When I was at Cannes in 1877 I got a message from him one day saying he was ill, and asking me to come and see him. He did not say how ill, so I put off going. Two days after I heard he was dead. Merimee's cynicism rather alarmed one. He was a capital caricaturist, though, to our astonishment, he assured us he had never drawn, or used a colour-box, till late in life.
It is "ask and have" with this man. Like Mephistopheles in the Raths-Keller, he gives us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an instance in point. Any one familiar with Mérimée's stories will smile at the naïveté with which Stevenson has taken the leading idea of Lokis, and surrounded it with the Spanish sunshine of Carmen.
At once a hundred shadowy reminiscences stirred in my friends' minds: Prosper Merimee's novels, stories of vendettas, plots of plays, morceaux d'operas, even of comic operas; and it was with a feeling in which the latter element predominated that they answered that they had come across no corpse.
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.
"Carmen," an opera in four acts, words by Meilhac and Halevy, adapted from Prosper Merimée's romance of "Carmen," was first produced at the Opera Comique, Paris, March 3, 1875, with Mme. Galli-Marie in the title-rôle and Mlle. Chapuy as Michaela. The scene is laid in Seville, time 1820.
Frederick Corder's 'Nordisa, a work of undoubted talent though suffering from a fatal lack of homogeneity, and of two operas by Sir Alexander Mackenzie. The first of these, 'Colomba, was produced in 1883. It achieved a success, but the gloomy character of the libretto prevented it from becoming really popular. It is founded upon Prosper Mérimée's famous Corsican tale.
Passion it is that thrills in every page of that admirable book of Merimee's, La Chronique de Charles IX., which has given birth in succession to those two masterpieces, Le Pre aux Clercs and Les Huguenots. And what indeed would life be without passion? If Fieschi's crime marked the year 1835 with a crimson letter, 1836 was the year of Alibaud's attempt.
It is hard to believe that. The work, as is well known, was taken from Merimee's Chronique du règne de Charles IX. This scene is in the romance and it is almost impossible that Meyerbeer had no idea of putting it into his opera.
His work is more joyous than Merimée's, if not so vigorous and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in the Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste, nothing corroding as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner short stories of Maupassant. More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Merimée, is M. Halévy a Parisian.
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