A Three-Phase Career
Prosper Merimee (Figure 11) was the son of the artist/civil servant Leonor Merimee and a relatively well-educated mother, Anne Moreau, a granddaughter of the prolific writer Mme Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, author of Beauty and the Beast.
His parents were supporters of Napoleon, “Voltaireans” of a sort, indifferent to religion, and gave him an unusual, non-Christian first name (which embarrassed him throughout his life), and almost certainly did not even have him baptized. He attended the Lycee Napoleon in Paris (later the College Henri IV). That school maintained the rationalist traditions of the French Enlightenment, and Napoleon was still greatly admired there. In consequence, Prosper remained either indifferent or hostile to organized religion throughout his career; but he early on acquired a nagging interest in superstition and magic. This peculiar combination lasted his whole life and popped up again and again in his writings, including those about eastern Europe.Literary historians and biographers generally see three phases in Merimee's writings - roughly 1820-30, 1830-50, and 1850-70. First, in the 1820s, under the Bourbon Restoration (1815-30), he dabbled in drama, literary “mystifications” or fakes, folk poetry, and prose, especially storytelling with anecdote, plot and personality central. When he was seventeen, in 1820, he translated the Scot James Macpherson's Ossian (1760), about the legendary past, progenitor of modern literary hoaxes. In 1825 Merimee's Theatre de Clara Gazul (1825) appeared, supposedly the rediscovered plays of a female Spanish writer, but actually by Merimee himself. Even though Merimee dressed up in Spanish women's garb and posed for the frontispiece, only a few friends recognized him.8 In 1827, he published La Guzla, ou choix de poesies illyriques, recuellies dans la Dalmatie, la Bosnie, la Cro- atie, et l’Herzegowine, ostensibly a collection of “Illyrian” or Serbian and Croatian folksongs.
Other early works include the stories in La Jaquerie [sic] (1828), on a medieval peasant revolt; Tamango (1829), about a Black slave in the United States; his tragic Corsican short story Mateo Falcone (1829); and Venleve- ment de la redoute (1829), about the French siege of the Shevardino redoubt, near Borodino, Russia, in September 1812.
His first great historical novel, Chronique du regne de Charles IX (1829), was a “cloak and dagger” tale about France's late-sixteenth-century Wars of Religion and the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, a volume disparaging religion. But the social implications of these revolutionary stories were unmistakable, and Soviet authors often noted them.9
In his second phase, during the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830-48), Merimee's attraction to the shocking anecdote and strong personality came to the fore, and he proved himself a master of the new short novel or novella, best exemplified in Colomba (1840), set in untamed Corsica, and Carmen (1845), the story of a wild gypsy girl set in Spain, and the inspiration for Bizet's fiery opera. He was appointed France's inspector general of historical monuments and began writing reports on his frequent travels to preserve those treasures, many badly damaged or destroyed during the Revolution. Both the great Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and the walled town of Carcassonne in the south owe much to him for their preservation. It is an irony of history that this sceptical Voltairean actually helped to preserve France's religious heritage.10 And his growing interest in Russian writers led to his fascination with the writings of Nikolai Gogol, who visited Paris in 1836-37 - Merimee even translated Gogol's new, and eventually iconic play Inspector General - perfect for France's official of the same title.
Third and finally, under Louis-Napoleon (president 1848-52 and emperor Napoleon III 1852-70), Merimee turned more and more to the study of history. He began with a treatise in two parts on classical Rome and the pre-history of Julius Caesar's political career, which earned him election to the Academy of Inscriptions. But he soon tired of the project and turned to the Slavonic world, which had suddenly become very important during the Napoleonic Wars. History, not literature, became pre-eminent.