Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/35

Rh "let himself go" in episode or peroration, in description or character. It would not have been difficult for a man of much less power, and it would have been perfectly easy for him, to make a most striking figure out of that Polish damsel of high degree. Marine Mniszek, who was by birth almost a princess, who was beautiful, who was for a few days Czarina of All the Russias; whose husband, "pretender" or not, was massacred almost before her eyes, while she herself narrowly escaped the same fate and worse; who then gave herself into the power of a coarser adventurer and for years was a sort of "Queen of the Leaguer" among wild Cossacks and outlaws; who was perhaps herself assassinated, and certainly died in a dungeon while still in the prime of her youth. Mérimée gives you all the facts, gives you them conscientiously, clearly, very far indeed from dully; but he refuses, with almost ostentatious abstinence, the few touches of art and nature which would have made her a heroine of romance, as well as a figure in history.

On the much more fully drawn figure of "Dampeter" (as Lord Berners calls Don Pedro) himself, Mérimée, though he is too critical to accept the whitewashing of certain Spanish historians, is by no means very