Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/25

Rh of democracy, it can not be said that he was attached to any French political party, either by intellectual or sentimental sympathies. He seems earlier to have had some positive dislike, if not even some positive contempt, of Louis Napoleon himself; and never, in what may be called their subsequent familiarity, got beyond a very lukewarm attitude toward him. But he had known from her early childhood, and was strongly attached to the beautiful and gracious Spanish-Scottish lady whom Napoleon soon made Empress; the Emperor himself, who had very few distinguished men of letters on his side, was only too glad to recruit one of the very greatest in France; and Mérimée, not by any means quite cheerfully, became, in 1853, a Senator. He astonished everybody by resigning his Inspectorship, which he might have kept, and which most men of the Imperial party, the distinguishing characteristic of which was certainly not disinterestedness or immaculate purity, as certainly would have kept.

For the seventeen years which elapsed between this time and the coincidence of his own death with the ruin of the Empire, Mérimée's life, which had already fallen into what may be called a variety of pretty identical grooves, changed these grooves a little but not much. His