THE ABBÉ AUBAIN AND MOSAICS

By

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

Translated by

EMILY MARY WALLER

With an Introduction by

ARTHUR SYMONS

LONDON

GRANT RICHARDS

1903

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE ABBÉ AUBAIN

MOSAICS—

MATEO FALCONE

THE VISION OF CHARLES XI.

HOW WE STORMED THE FORT

TAMANGO

THE GAME OF BACKGAMMON

THE ETRUSCAN VASE

THE VENUS OF ILLE

LOKIS

THE BLUE CHAMBER

THE "VICCOLO" OF MADAM LUCREZIA

DJOUMANE

INTRODUCTION

Mérimée's temperament was really that of the scholar, not of the artist,and even his art came to him as a kind of scholarship. He did one thingafter another, as if challenging himself to accomplish a certain end,and then, that end accomplished, he no longer cared to repeat it. Thatis the scholar's way, not the artist's; and the scholar's instinct isseen, too, in that too purely critical attitude which he adopted,towards others and towards himself, working in almost a hostile fashionupon every impulse, so as to destroy his interest in any part of hiswork but the way in which it was done. He began his career by two veryserious mystifications, Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul, a collection ofshort plays supposed to be translated from the Spanish, and La Guzla,a collection of ballads in prose supposed to be translated from theIllyrian. Later on he was, perhaps, a little too anxious to representhimself as having intended from the first to parody the fierceness andthe "local colour" of the Romantics. "Vers l'an de grâce 1827 j'étaisromantique," he says ironically, in the preface of 1840, as hereprints his work of thirteen years ago. "Nous disions auxclassiques: 'Vos Grecs ne sont point des Grecs; vos Romains ne sontpoint des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner à vos compositions lacouleur locale. Point de salut sans couleur locale.'" But

...