Volume 16, Number 12 · July 1, 1971
Connoisseur of Revenge
By Robert Mazzocco
Prosper Mérimée
by A.W. Raitt
Scribner's, 453 pp., $15.00
Mérimée is a fascinating figure. He was a master of the nouvelle, a government official and an inveterate traveler, an archaeologist and a historian, a man of the world who could barely endure the world, a bachelor addicted to affairs and 'infernal coquetry,' yet wretched enough, or maudlin enough, to remark—and without the irony which made his name—that there is nothing sweeter in the world than 'the society of an intelligent woman of whom you are not and cannot be the lover.' 'For fear of being duped,' Taine tells us, Mérimée 'was mistrustful in life, in love, in learning, in art, and he was duped by his own mistrustfulness.' Prompted no doubt by Mérimée's ghost, he adds, sardonically, in the preface to the posthumously published Lettres à une Inconnue: 'But one is always duped by something.'
Review, 4826 words
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