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But against this allowance a just but an ample one for defects, must be set to Stevenson's credit such a combination of literary and story-telling charm as perhaps no writer except Mérimée has ever equalled; while, if the literary side of him had not the golden perfection, the accomplished ease of the Frenchman, his romance has a more genial, a fresher, a more natural quality.

Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation to me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most cared to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as George Sand, and Merimee, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he had known.

Indeed, it is Merimée that M. Halévy would hail as his master, and not Flaubert, whom most of his fellow French writers of fiction follow blindly. Now, while the author of Salamnbo was a romanticist turned sour, the author of Carmen was a sentimentalist sheathed in irony.

In the beginning of 1870 two hitherto unprinted pieces were added, of which one was a paper written some time before on Kamma Rahbek, which had been revised, the other, a new one on Merimee, which in general shows what at that time I admired in style.

As I left this honest and courageous man in the street I saw M. Mérimée, his exact opposite, coming towards me. "Oh!" said M. Mérimée, "I was looking for you." I answered him, "I hope you will not find me." He held out his hand to me, and I turned my back on him. I have not seen him since. I believe he is dead.

*"Dead Souls," translated by Isabel Hapgood. Prosper Merimee, who knew Russian well, and was an absolute master of the French language, remarked: "La langue russe, qui est, autant que j 'en puis juger, le plus riche des idiomes de l'Europe, semble faite pour exprimer les nuances les plus delicates.

Carmen, which, like Périchole, owes the suggestion of its plot and characters to Prosper Mérimée, is little more than the task-work of the two well-trained play-makers: it was sufficient for its purpose, no more and no less. Of all the opera-books of MM. Meilhac and Halévy, that one is easily first and foremost which has for its heroine the Helen of Troy whom Marlowe's Faustus declared

His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his startling caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper Merimee: terse epigram, felicitous apropos, whimsical presentment of the topic under discussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the slightest change of muscle: "All the charm of all the Muses Often flowering in a lonely word."

After consulting with Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve and others, Buloz declined the proposal, and with the aid of his friends bought out the brothers Bonnaire for a sum just double that which they had offered him.

If we had written a half, or a quarter part of what M. Mérimée wrote, I should find some embarrassment in the task that has been given me, or rather I should have to modify it; in place of saying what I have said, and what I affirm, that M. Flaubert has written a good book, an honest book, useful and moral, I should say: literature has its rights; M. Mérimée has made a very remarkable literary work, and it is not necessary to show ourselves too particular about details when the whole is irreproachable.