Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/184

 out of her mouth she flipped it at me with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me.'

This first meeting of Carmen with the dragoon was pictured in a brilliant hot-looking plaza as if before the cigarette factory in Seville. This woman in throwing the flower at the soldier expressed wonderfully in one fleet moment, by hand and lip and eye, the savage sordid poetry and passionate freedom—that unearthly fragrance—which is Carmen.

The film version followed the scenes of the opera rather than the story, which took nothing from the headlong truth of the central figure.

But no picturing can equal the star-clarity of Mérimée's prose in Carmen's death-scene—a thing of a piercing pathos comparable to nothing I know in writing.

'After we had gone a little distance I said to her, "So, my Carmen, you are quite ready to follow me, isn't it so?"

She answered, "Yes, I'll follow you to the death—but I won't live with you any more."

We had reached a lonely gorge. I stopped my horse.

"Is this the place?" she said.

And with a spring she reached the ground.