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Updated: May 9, 2025
Talking of rewriting, Prosper Mérimée, best known for Carmen, is said to have rewritten his Colomba no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over. But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern times was Gustave Flaubert.
M. Mérimée has wrongly given himself out as one of the confederates of the coup d'état. He had, however, nothing to boast of in this. The truth is that M. Mérimée was in no way a confidant. Louis Bonaparte made no useless confidences.
Here are exemplified the architectural styles of five successive centuries, and, as Merimee once wrote, in passing from one part of the edifice to another, it is as if you passed from one to another religion. But the supreme features of the cathedral are its stained-glass windows, which include some of the very oldest in the world.
Again he convoked the friends who three years before had greeted the Contes d'Espagne with acclamation, but, to the unutterable surprise and disappointment of both brothers, there was not a word of sympathy or applause: Mérimée alone expressed his approbation, and assured the young poet that he had made immense progress.
The French apply the term roman to extensive works like "Notre Dame de Paris" and "Eugénie Grandet"; and they apply the term nouvelle to works of briefer compass but similar method, like the "Colomba" and the "Carmen" of Prosper Mérimée.
At present they came to the front, proudly conscious of their merits; and an entire literature was destined to be devoted to them, an entire art to depict or satirize their manners. Scribe, Stendhal, Merimee, Henry Monnier, Daumier, and Gavarni were some of the men whose work illustrated the bourgeois regime, either prior to or contemporaneous with the work of Balzac.
Among the writers of the last generation who excelled in the conte which is almost the exact French equivalent for Short-story, as nouvelle may be taken to indicate the story which is merely short, the episode, the incident, the amplified anecdote were Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, and Prosper Mérimée. The best work of Mérimée has never been surpassed.
Think of the men and women with whom the new comer associated for his genius was quickly divined: Hugo, Lamartine, Pere Lamenais, ah! what balm for those troubled days was in his "Paroles d'un Croyant," Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon, Merimee, Gautier, Liszt, Victor Cousin, Baudelaire, Ary Scheffer, Berlioz, Heine, who asked the Pole news of his muse the "laughing nymph," "If she still continued to drape her silvery veil around the flowing locks of her green hair, with a coquetry so enticing; if the old sea god with the long white beard still pursued this mischievous maid with his ridiculous love?"
Christophe was lost, drowned, submerged under such a deluge of poetry and turned to prose. He found Gustave de Molinari, Flechier, Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, Merimee, Malte-Brun, Voltaire, Lame-Fleury, Dumas pere, J.J. Bousseau, Mezieres, Mirabeau, de Mazade, Claretie, Cortambert, Frederic II, and M. de Voguee. The most often quoted of French historians was Maximilien Samson-Frederic Schoell.
The handsome villain of romance, seductive by the complexity of his emotions, by the persistence of his mysterious grief, would find himself in that theatrical scene most thoroughly at home; nor did Prosper Mérimée fail to seize the opportunity, for the mountains of Ronda were the very hunting-ground of Don Josè, who lost his soul for Carmen.
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