Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/61

Rh stories that I know, and in particular I hardly know one that effects so complete a triumph in disguising the point of the story where actuality passes into dream. I am myself, not merely a reader of stories of some fifty years' standing, but a reviewer of them through more than twenty; and I do not think I am very easy to deceive on such a point as this. Yet the first time that I read Djoûmane, I confess that I was taken in, not quite to the end, but nearly so.

As for the last fruits of this wonderful tree, La Chambre Bleue and Lokis, the former has been carped at for its arrangement and the latter because we happen to know that Mérimée had at one time thought of making it more eccentric and more "scabrous" than it is now, at least on the surface. But this latter point of view is accidental and illegitimate; and we have nothing to do, as critics, with anything but the tales as they are actually submitted to us. And they are all but impeccable. The desideration of a different ending or a different beginning or a different middle for La Chambre Bleue is one of these critical ineptitudes for which there are two admirable proverbial phrases,—"Seeking noon at fourteen o'clock" and "Asking for better bread than is made of wheat." Mérimée, whose knowledge of life, if not