Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/66

lviii of such publication in this case would have been horrible to Mérimée. Yet we can hardly blame Mlle. Dacquin, even if we were not bribed by the gift she has bestowed upon us. The "petty treason" of revealing this thirty years' love, has a manifold atonement—of humour in the spectacle of this sceptic's enthusiasm and this cynic's inamoration; of justice in its reversal of a false public opinion; of coals-of-fire even—for there can be no doubt that Mérimée made the Inconnue even more unhappy than she made him and with far less excuse, yet, humanity being humanity, with so much excuse after all!

At any rate, here is the man "in his habit as he lived" in the one sense, as opposed to the writer in his habit as he seemed to so many, in the other. A man assuredly not perfect; nor a proper moral man by any means; not a religious one; not other things which the good man of the modern Stoics ought to be. A man with a fancy for some things which are not convenient; somewhat (though not when his friends were concerned) self-indulgent; by no means over-inclined to swim against the stream, though he could do this too; something of an epicurean, though not so much as he seemed to be; even less of a cynic, but a little somewhat of that too. Yet a man, who to very rare gifts of