Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/29

Rh to a Rabelaisian-antiquarian friend in the Avignon library, and others still.

So far as the life of the writer is concerned, the story told by Letters, unless very carefully garbled and economised by the editor, becomes necessarily a more and more sombre one as life draws more and more into "the browner shades"; and there was not likely to be an exception in the case of a pessimist like Mérimée. He had, however, the alleviations of tolerably ample means, of some warm friendships, to use no stronger word, and of a curious and rather unexampled domestic "guardianship," which he seems to have prized most unaffectedly, at the hands of two English ladies of mature age and friends of his mother, Miss Lagden and her sister Mrs. Ewers, who kept house for him at Cannes, and seem to have always been at hand in Paris, who watched by his deathbed in the chaos of the Année Terrible, and who saw to his interment. His death on September 23, 1870, might, but for the infelicity of its circumstance, have been taken for a "happy release," inasmuch