Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/408

Rh calculations, her never obeying the first impulse. She had carried so far refusing to see him, for fear of getting tired of him, that he estimates that they have spent but three or four hours together in the course of six or seven years. This is Platonism with a vengeance and Mérimée makes an odd figure in it. He constantly protests, and begs for a walk in the Champs Elysées or a talk in the gallery of the Louvre. The critic to whom we just alluded and whose impression differs from our own in that these volumes have made him like the writer more than before, rather than less, maintains that we have a right to be very severe toward the heroine. She was cold, he affirms; she was old-maidish and conventional; she had no spontaneous perceptions. When Mérimée is not at hand to give her a cue her opinions are evidently of the flimsiest. When she travels he exhorts her almost fiercely to observe and inquire, to make a note of everything curious in manners and morals, and he invariably scolds her for the inefficiency of her compte-rendu. This is probably true enough. She had not the unshrinking glance of her guide, philosopher and friend. But we confess that our own sentiment with regard to her partakes of vague compassion. Mérimée's tone and general view of things, judged in a vivid moral light, were such as very effectually to corrupt a pliable and