Letters to an Unknown. Prosper Merimee

of tragedy; whether his apparent callousness is not due to the fear of ridicule; whether his free-and-easy tone is not the effect of embarrassment; whether the gentleman has not been harmful to the author; whether his art was sufficiently dear to him. On more than one occasion, notably in The Venus of Ille, he availed himself of this to mystify the reader. Elsewhere, in Lokis,[4] a grotesque idea, with double meaning, lies at the foundation of the tale, like a toad in a chiselled casket. He seemed to find delight in seeing a woman’s fingers unlock the casket, and a pretty face terrified by the sight of some object of loathing made him laugh. It appears that he wrote almost always at random, to amuse himself, to pass the time, without allowing himself to be swayed by an idea, with no conception of a great unity of purpose, with no self-subordination to his work.

      In this, as in all else, he was disenchanted, and we find him finally out of tune with life. Scepticism engenders melancholy; and in this regard his correspondence is truly depressing. His health failed gradually; he spent his winters regularly at Cannes, realising that life was slipping away from him.

      He took care of his health; he watched over himself; it is the sole concern which the man continued to feel until the end. By the advice of his physician, he practised archery, and as a distraction painted views of the adjacent country. Every day he might be seen walking in silence along the country roads with his two Englishwomen, one carrying his bow, the other his box of water-colours. In this way he killed time and cultivated patience. Out of kindliness of heart he went to a lonely cabin half a mile away, to nurse a cat; he collected flies for a pet lizard; these were his favorite companions. When the railway train brought a friend to visit him, he recovered his animation and became once more his charming self; his letters were so always, for his quaint and exquisite humour he could not repress. But of happiness there was none; to him the future was dark, almost as dark as it is to us to-day; before closing his eyes it was his sorrow to witness the complete destruction of his country’s edifice. He expired September 23, 1870.

      If one should endeavour to sum up his character and his genius, he will find, I fancy, that with a tender heart, the gift of nature, endowed with superior intelligence, having lived the life of a gentleman and having worked with somewhat of industry, producing a number of books of the highest order, Mérimée did not, however, accomplish all the good that was his to yield, did not attain to all the happiness to which it was his right to aspire. Through his fear of being a dupe, he was suspicious in every phase of life—in love, in science, in art;[5] and yet he was the dupe of his own mistrust. One is sure always of being the dupe of something, and it may be better, perhaps, to reconcile oneself to the fact in advance.

      H. TAINE.

      November, 1873.

LETTERS TO AN UNKNOWN

       Lettres à une Inconnue

       Table of Contents

I

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      Paris, Thursday.

      I RECEIVED your letter in due time. Everything about you is paradoxical, and the same reasons lead you to act in a manner precisely contrary to that of other mortals. You say you are going to the country. Well and good; that signifies that you will have nothing to do but write, for in the country the days are long, and idleness is propitious for letter-writing. At the same time, the watchfulness and solicitude of your guardian being less interrupted by the customary engagements of the city, you will have to submit to more catechising when letters come to you. In a château, moreover, the arrival of a letter is an event. Not at all; while you may not be able to write, you may, on the other hand, receive no end of letters.

      I am beginning to be accustomed to your ways, and am no longer surprised at anything you do. I beg you, however, to take pity on me, and do not put to too severe a test the unfortunate habit I have formed—I know not how—of thinking everything that you do to be right.

      I recall having been somewhat too frank, perhaps, in my last letter, on the subject of my own disposition. A friend of mine, an old diplomat, and a very shrewd man, has often said to me: “Never speak ill of yourself. Your friends will always do that for you.” I begin to fear that you will interpret literally every word of disparagement I said of myself. You must understand that my cardinal virtue is modesty; I carry it to excess, and tremble lest it may prejudice you against me. Some other time, when I am more happily inspired, I will give you the exact nomenclature of all my characteristics. It will be a long list. To-day I am not feeling well, and dare not launch forth into this geometrical progression.

      You can not possibly guess where I was Saturday night, and what I was doing at midnight. I was on the roof of one of the towers of Notre Dame, drinking orangeade and eating ices, in the company of four of my friends and of a matchless moon, all of us attended by an immense owl that flapped his wings around us. Paris, indeed, in the moonlight and at that hour, presents a truly beautiful picture. It resembles the cities described in the Thousand and One Nights, whose inhabitants were enchanted while they slept. Parisians, as a rule, go to bed at midnight—the more stupid they. Our party was a curious assemblage; there were four nations represented, each one having a different point of view. The tiresome part of it was that some of us felt obliged, in the presence of the moon and of the owl, to assume a sentimental tone, and to utter commonplaces. To tell the truth, everybody began gradually to talk nonsense.

      I do not know why and by what association of ideas this semi-poetic evening recalls to my mind another, which was not in the least poetic. I went to a ball given by some of my young friends, to which were invited all the ballet girls of the Opera. These women are, as a rule, dull, but I have observed that in moral feeling they are superior to the men of their class. The only vice which separates them from other women is poverty. You will be singularly edified by all these rhapsodies, so I shall hasten to a close, which I should have done long ago.

      Good-bye. Do not bear me a grudge for the unflattering portrait of myself which I have given you.

II

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      Paris.

      Frankness and truth are virtues seldom esteemed by women as desirable; rather are they qualities to be avoided. For this reason you regard me as a Sardanapalus, because I attended a ball at which the ballet girls of the Opera were present. You reproach me for that evening as if it were a crime, and you reproach me for commending those poor girls as if that were a still greater crime. I repeat it, give them wealth, and thereafter only their good qualities will be seen. But an insurmountable barrier has been raised by the aristocracy between the different social classes, so that neither class may discover how much alike are the happenings on each side of the barrier. I want to tell you the story of a ballet girl that I heard in this same shocking society. In a house in the rue Saint Honoré lived a poor woman who never left the little attic room which she rented at three francs a month. She had one daughter twelve years old, who was always neatly dressed, very demure, and extremely reserved in manner. This little girl went out three afternoons in the week and returned alone at midnight. It was known that she was a chorus girl at the Opera. One day she goes down to the porter’s room and asks for a lighted candle. It is given to her. The porter’s wife, surprised not to see her come downstairs again, climbs to the garret, finds the woman dead on her wretched pallet, and the little girl occupied in burning unread an enormous quantity of letters which she was taking from a large trunk. She says: “My mother died last night, and charged me to destroy all her letters without reading them.” This child has never known her mother’s real name; she is now absolutely alone in the world, without any resource but to act the vulture, the monkey, or the devil at the Opera.

      Her mother’s last word of counsel was to urge her to be prudent, and to continue to be a ballet girl. She is, moreover, very discreet, deeply