Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/20

xii his existence. Yet it was very far from monotonous; and even if it had been more so in outward circumstances, it would have been filled with pulse and movement by his activities of brain and (whatever some of his contemporaries may have thought) of heart.

He was born on the 28th of September, 1803 (a date to which he often refers with a semi-Swiftian bitterness) at Paris, of a Norman family; and perhaps it is not fanciful to say that he represents, remarkably enough, one of the types of the rich and varied Norman temperament as it has shown itself on both sides of the Channel. His grandfather had been a lawyer and steward to Marshal Broglie (Carlyle's "Broglie the War God"); his father was a painter with more knowledge than artistic skill, a professor, and an official who acted as a sort of patron to Hazlitt when he visited Paris as an art student, and had travelled much. His father married rather late in life, Anna Moreau, a pupil at a school where he taught. In her Mérimée possessed (what I fancy most free-thinkers themselves would much rather not have possessed), a free-thinking mother: and his own parade of infidelity is generally set down to her influence. He was, at any rate, devoted to her, kept her with him after his father's death until