Prosper Mérimée
Prosper Mérimée was a French writer in the movement of Romanticism, one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian, a language for which he had great affection, before translating the work of several notable Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, responsible for the protection of many historic sites, including the medieval citadel of Carcassonne and the restoration of the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Along with the writer George Sand, he discovered the series of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn, arranging for their preservation. He was instrumental in the creation of Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, where the tapestries now are displayed. The official database of French monuments, the Base Mérimée, bears his name.
Education and literary debut
Prosper Mérimée was born in Paris, the First French Republic, on 28 September 1803, early in the Napoleonic era. His father Léonor was a painter who became professor of design at the École polytechnique, and studied the chemistry of oil paints. In 1807 his father was named Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture. His mother Anne was twenty-nine when he was born and was also a painter. His father's sister, Augustine, was the mother of the physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel and the orientalist Fulgence Fresnel. He was the great-grandson of French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont on his mother's side.Both of Mérimée's parents spoke English well, traveled frequently to England and entertained many British guests. By the age of fifteen he was fluent in English. He had a talent for foreign languages, and besides English mastered classical Greek and Latin. Later in life he became fluent in Spanish, and could passably speak Serbian and Russian.
At the age of seven, Prosper was enrolled in the Lycée Napoléon, which after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 became the Lycée Henri-IV. His classmates and friends were the children of the elite of Restoration France, including Adrien Jussieu, son of famous botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, and Jean-Jacques Ampère, son of André-Marie Ampère, famous for his research in physics and electrodynamics. In school he had a strong interest in history, and was fascinated by magic and the supernatural, which later became important elements in many of his stories.
He finished the Lycée with high marks in classical languages and in 1820 he began to study law, planning for a position in the royal administration. In 1822 he passed the legal examinations and received his license to practice law. However, his real passion was for French and foreign literature: In 1820 he translated the works of Ossian, the presumed ancient Gaelic poet, into French. At the beginning of the 1820s he frequented the salon of Juliette Récamier, a venerable figure in the literary and political life of Paris, where he met Chateaubriand and other prominent writers. In 1822, at the salons, he met Henri Beyle, twenty years older, who became one of his closest friends, and later became famous as a novelist under the pen name of Stendhal. He then began to attend the salon of Étienne Delécluze, a painter and art critic, whose members were interested in the new school of Romanticism in art and literature.
Between the spring of 1823 and the summer of 1824, he wrote his first literary works: a political and historical play called Cromwell; a satirical piece called Les Espagnols en Dannark ; and a set of six short theater pieces called the Théâtre de Clara Gazul, a witty commentary about the theater, politics and life which purported to be written by a Spanish actress, but which actually targeted current French politics and society. In March 1825 he read his new works at the salon of Delécluze. The first two works were quickly forgotten, but the scenes of Clara Gazul had considerable success with his literary friends. They were printed in the press under the name of their imaginary author, and were his first published work. Balzac described Clara Gazul as "a decisive step in the modern literary revolution", and its fame soon reached beyond France; the German Romanticist Goethe wrote an article praising it. Mérimée was not so gracious toward Goethe; he called Goethe's own work "a combination of genius and German naïveté".
King Louis XVIII died in 1824, and the regime of the new King, Charles X, was much more authoritarian and reactionary. Mérimée and his friends became part of the liberal opposition to the regime. On 30 November 1825, he took part in a student demonstration led by the young but already famous Victor Hugo. He was invited to Hugo's home, where he charmed the poet by making macaroni for him. Mérimée was drawn into the new romantic movement, led by the painter Eugène Delacroix and the writers Hugo, Alfred de Musset and Eugène Sue. In 1830 he attended the riotous premiere of Hugo's play Hernani, bringing with him a group of friends, including Stendhal and the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, to support Hugo. Hugo made an anagram from his name, transforming Prosper Mérimée into Premiere Prose.
In July 1827 he published in a literary journal a new work, La Guzla. Ostensibly it was a collection of poems from the ancient Adriatic province of Illyria, and it was published under another assumed name, Hyacinthe Maglanovich. The poems were highly romantic, filled with phantoms and werewolves, and were intended as satirical commentary on the exaggerated and bombastic style of the era that people would get swept up in. This was especially true for works that included a foreign setting and placed an emphasis on local traditions. Mérimée drew upon many historic sources for his picturesque and gothic portrait of the Balkans, including a tale about vampires taken from the writings of the 18th-century French monk Dom Calmet. These poems, published in literary journals, were widely praised both in France and abroad. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin had translated some of the poems in the book into Russian before he was notified by Mérimée, through his Russian friend Sobolevsky, that the poems, except for one Mérimée translated from a real Serbian poet, were not authentic. The book was not a commercial success, selling only a dozen copies, but the journals and press made Mérimée an important literary figure. From then on Mérimée's stories and articles were regularly published by the two leading literary magazines of Paris, the Revue des deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris.
After La Guzla, he wrote three traditional novels: La Jacquerie was an historical novel about a peasant revolt in the Middle Ages, filled with flamboyant costumes, picturesque details and colorful settings. The critic Henri Patin reported that novel was "lacking in drama, but many of the scenes were excellent". The second, La Famille Carvajal, was a parody of the work of Lord Byron, set in 17th-century New Granada, filled with murders and crimes of passion. Many of the critics entirely missed that the novel was a parody: the Revue de Paris denounced the story for its "brutal and shameful passions". The third was A Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX, another historical novel, set during the reign of Charles IX of France in the 16th century. It was written three years before Victor Hugo published his historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris. Mérimée's story featured a combination of irony and extreme realism, including a detailed and bloody recreation of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. It was published in March 1829, without any great success, and its author was by then tired of the genre. "I wrote a wicked novel that bores me", he wrote to his friend Albert Stapfer.
Novellas, travels in Spain and government posts (1829–1834)
In 1829, Mérimée found a new literary genre that perfectly suited his talents; the nouvelle or novella, essentially a long short story or short novel. Between 1829 and 1834, he wrote thirteen stories, following three basic principles; a brief story told in prose; a sparse and economical style of writing, with no unneeded lyricism; and a unity of action, all leading to the ending, which was often abrupt and brutal. In a short period Mérimée wrote two of his most famous novellas, Mateo Falcone, about a tragic vendetta in Corsica, and Tamango, a drama on a slave-trading ship, which were published in the Revue de Paris, and had considerable success.He also began a series of long trips which provided material for much of his future writing. In June 1830 he traveled to Spain, which he explored at a leisurely pace, spending many hours in the Prado Museum in Madrid, attending bullfights, and studying Moorish architecture in Córdoba and Seville. He was in Spain in July 1830, when the government of Charles X of France was overthrown and replaced by the rule of Louis Philippe I. Fascinated by Spain, he decided not to return to France immediately, but to continue his journey. In October 1830 he met Cipriano Portocarrero, a liberal Spanish aristocrat and the future Count of Montijo, who shared many of his literary and historical interests and political views. He visited the Count and met his wife, the Countess of Montijo, and their young daughter, Eugénie, then four years old, who in 1853 was to become the Empress Eugénie, the wife of Emperor Napoleon III.
He returned to Paris in January 1831, and began publishing vivid accounts of his trip to Spain in the Revue de Paris under the title Lettres d'Espagne. These included the first mention of Carmen, a story told to him by the Countess of Montijo. He also sought a position in the new administration of King Louis Philippe. Many of his friends had already found jobs in the new government; Stendhal was named French consul to Trieste, and the writers Chateaubriand and Lamartine both received honorary government posts. Mérimée, twenty-seven years old, briefly served as the chief of the secretariat of the Ministry of the Navy, and then, as the new government was organized, was moved from post to post; for a short time he was director of fine arts, then was moved to the Interior Ministry, where, he wrote ironically, "I conducted, with great glory, the telegraph lines, the administration of the corps of firemen, the municipal guards, etc." He turned out to be an efficient administrator, and was put in charge of organizing the response to the epidemic of cholera which struck Paris between 29 March and 1 October 1832, killing eighteen thousand Parisians. At the peak of the epidemic, he spent much of his time at the Hotel-Dieu, the main hospital of Paris. In November 1832 he was moved again to the State Council, where he became Chief of Accounts. He was not there for long; in December 1832 Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers sent him to London on an extended diplomatic mission to report on the British elections. He became a member of the most prominent London club, the Athenaeum, and consulted with the venerable French ambassador to England, Prince Talleyrand.