Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/50

xlii quite stainless, has not one unamiable fault. Madame de Piennes, the agreeably mistaken heroine of L'Abbé Aubain, and others have nothing "fatal" or Lilith-like about them. Let us clear our minds of cant.

With minds so cleared we are in a fit state to approach the main body of Mérimée's greatest and least-questioned work, the prose tales in direct narrative form. In the usual French editions these are collected without much regard to date; but they fall chronologically into three broad divisions. The first, containing not merely Charles IX at the beginning and Colomba at the end, but most of the better-known short tales, was the product of the author's youth and tolerably early manhood, from 1829 to 1840. A smaller number, nearly all remarkable, including Carmen, Arsène Guillot, L'Abbé Aubain and the less generally popular but excellent Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia, are scattered over the forties; while two of the greatest, Lokis and La Chambre Bleue, date from quite the last years of Mérimée's life. But their characteristics are singularly equal; however much water may have passed the mill between 1829 and 1866, the interval saw little change and certainly no falling off in the artist's powers.

It is, however, generally agreed that those