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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MEC-MIC |
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MERIMEE, PROSPER (1803-1870) , French novelist, archaeologist, essayist, and in all these capacities one of the greatest masters of French style during the r9th century, was born at Paris on the 28th of September 1803. His grandfather, of Norman abstraction, had been a lawyer and steward to the marechal de Broglie. His father, Jean Francois Leonor Merimee (1757-1836), was a painter of repute. Merimee had English blood in his veins on the mother's side, and had English proclivities in many ways. He was educated for the bar, but entered the public service instead. A young man at the time of the Romantic movement
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He had already obtained a considerable position in the civil service, and after the revolution of July he was chef de cabinet to two different ministers. He was then appointed to the more congenial post of inspector-general of historical monuments. Merimee was a born archaeologist, combining linguistic faculty of a very unusual kind with accurate scholarship, with remark-able historical appreciation, and with a sincere love for the arts of design and construction, in the former of which he had some practical skill. In his official capacity he published numerous reports, some of which, with other similar pieces, have been republished in his works. .He also devoted himself to history proper during the latter years of the July monarchy, and published numerous essays and works of no great length, chiefly on Spanish, Russian and ancient Roman history. He did not, however, neglect novel writing during this period, and numerous short tales, almost without exception masterpieces, appeared, chiefly in the Revue de Paris. The best of all, Colomba, a Corsican story of extraordinary power, appeared in 1840. He travelled a good deal; and in one of his journeys to Spain, about the middle of Louis Philippe's reign, he made an acquaintance destined to influence his future life not a littlethat of Mme de Montijo, mother of the future empress Eugenie. Merimee, though in manner and language the most cynical of men, was a devoted friend, and shortly before the accession of Napoleon III. he had occasion to show this. His friend, Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja, was accused of having stolen valuable manuscripts and books from French libraries, and Merimee took his part so warmly that he was actually sentenced to and underwent fine and imprisonment. He had been elected of the Academy in 1844, and also of the Academy of Inscriptions , of which he was a prominent member. Between 1840 and 1850 he wrote more tales, the chief
The empire made a considerable difference in Merimee's life. His sympathies were against democracy, and his habitual cynicism and his irreligious prejudices made legitimism distasteful to him. But the marriage of Napoleon III. with the daughter of Mme de Montijo at once enlisted what was always strongest with Merimeethe sympathy of Personal friendshipon the emperor's side. He was made a senator, but his most important role was that of a constant and valued private friend of both the " master and mistress of the house
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years; it partook at one time of the character of love, at another of that of simple friendship, and Merimee is exhibited in the letters under the most surprisingly diverse lights, most of them more or less amiable, and all interesting. The correspondence with Panizzi has somewhat less personal interest
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series , and others since published, abound in gossip, in amusing anecdotes, in sharp
Merimee's character was a peculiar and in some respects an unfortunate one, but by no means unintelligible. Partly by temperament, partly it is said owing to some childish experience, when he discovered that he had been duped and determined never to be so again, not least owing to the example of Henri Beyle (Stendhal), who was a friend of his family, and of whom he saw much, Merimee appears at a comparatively early age to have imposed upon himself as a duty the maintenance of an attitude of sceptical indifference and sarcastic criticism. Although a man of singularly warm and affectionate feelings, he obtained the credit of being a cold-hearted cynic; and, though both independent and disinterested, he was abused as a hanger-on of the imperial court. Both imputations were wholly undeserved, and indeed were prompted to a great extent by political spite or by the resentment felt by his literary equals on the other side at the cool ridicule with which he met them. But he deserved in some of the bad as well as many of the good senses of the term the name of a man of the Renaissance. He had the warm partisanship and amiability towards friends and the scorpion-like sting for his foes, he had the ardent delight in learning and especially in matters of art and belles lettres, he had the scepticism, the voluptuousness, the curious delight in the contemplation of the horrible, which marked the men of letters of the humanist period. Even his literary work has this Renaissance character. It is tolerably extensive, amounting to some seventeen or eighteen volumes, but its bulk is not great for a life which was not short, and which was occupied, at least nominally, in little else. About a third of it consists of the letters already mentioned. Rather more than another third consists of the official work which has been already alluded toreports, essays, short historical sketches, the chief of which latter is a history of Pedro the Cruel (1843), and another of the curious pretender known in Russian story as the false Demetrius (1852). Some of the literary essays, such as those on Beyle, on Turgueniev, &c., where a personal element enters, are excellent. Against others and against the larger historical sketchesadmirable as they areTaine's criticism that they want life has some force. They are, however, all marked by Merimee's admirable style, by his sound and accurate scholar-ship, his strong intellectual grasp of whatever he handled, his cool unprejudiced views, his marvellous faculty of designing and proportioning the treatment of his work. In purely arckaeo-logical matters his Description des peintures de Saint-Savin is very noteworthy. It is, however, in the remaining third of his work, consisting entirely of tales either in narrative or in dramatic form, and especially in the former, that his full power is perceived. He translated a certain number of things (chiefly from the Russian); but his fame does not rest on these, on his already-mentioned youthful supercheries, or on his later semi-dramatic works. There remain about a score of tales, extending in point of composition over exactly forty years and in length from that of Colomba, the longest, which fills about one hundred and fifty pages, to that of l'Enlevement de la redoute (1829), which fills just half a dozen. They are unquestionably the best things of their kind written during the century, the only nouvelles that can challenge comparison with them being the very best of Gautier, and one or two of Balzac. The motives are sufficiently different. In Colomba and Mateo Falcone (1829), the Corsican point of honour is drawn
Merimee's works have only been gradually published since his death. There is no uniform edition, but almost everything is obtainable in the collections of MM. Charpentier and Calmann Levy. Most of the sets of letters above referred to from those to the first inconnue, where the introducer was Taine, have essay-prefaces on Merimee. Maurice Tourneux's Prosper Merimee, sa bibliographic (1876) and Prosper Merimee, ses portraits (1879), are useful, while Emile Faguet and many other critics have. dealt with him incidentally. But the best single book on him by far is the Merimee et ses amis of Augustin Filon (1894). M. F. Chambon's Correspondence inedite (1897) gives little that is substantive, but supplies and corrects a good many gaps or faults in earlier editions. English translations, especially of Colomba and Carmen, are numer ous. The Chronique de Charles IX. was translated by G. Saintsbury in 1889 with an introduction; and the same writer has also prefixed a much more elaborate essay, containing a review of Merimee's entire work, to an American translation. (G. SA.) End of Article: MERIMEE, PROSPER (1803-1870) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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