Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/22

xiv places in various public offices. And he was lucky enough, when he was only twenty-eight, to obtain that of Inspector-General of Historical Monuments, an office of considerable dignity, agreeable and to him, specially congenial in its duties, sufficiently well paid, and perfectly compatible with the devotion of plenty of time to society which he did not dislike, to non-official travel of which he was fond, to those occasional ensconcements at home and in solitude to which, by one of the frequent contrasts in his character, he was passionately devoted, and to literature, of which he soon showed an extraordinary command.

Mérimée was early thrown into contact with the Romantic movement. In later life he was regarded as, affected to be, and in a certain sense was, a kind of deserter from it. A man of his scholarship and his critical temperament must have very quickly perceived the extravagance, the one-sidedness, and the sciolism of not a few of those who took part in it. Yet it may still be questioned whether he was not to the day of his death a Romantic sheep (though a sheep as dangerous to meddle with as a Rocky Mountain ram) who chose to wear wolf's clothing and to howl with the wolves at times. His fondness for exotic, and what the mere French "Classic"