aesthetic sense approach closest--almost merge into each other,--as, indeed, they did in Merimee himself. The principles as well as the practice of narrative are here at once reduced to their lowest and exalted to their highest terms. The thing is not merely fermented but distilled; not so much a fact as a formula, with a formula's precision but without its dryness. If we take the familiar trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit and apply it to subject, style, and narrative power in a story, we shall find them all perfectly achieved and perfectly wedded here.[226] [Sidenote: The _Dernieres Nouvelles_; _Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia_.] About the same time as that at which _Carmen_ was published (indeed a year earlier) Merimee wrote a shorter, but not very short story, _Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia_, which for some reason only appeared, at least in book form, long after, with the _Dernieres Nouvelles_ and posthumously. It is, I think, his one attempt in the explained[227] supernatural--a kind for which I have myself no very great affection. But it is extremely well done, and if there are some suggestions of impropriety in it, Hymen, to use Paul de Kock's phrase (it is really pleasant to think of Paul and Prosper--the farthest opposites of French contemporary novel-craft--together), covers up the more recent of them with his mantle. But some at least of the other contents of the same volume are worthy of greater praise. One, _Le Coup de Pistolet_, is a translation from Poushkin; another, _Federigo_, an agreeable version of an Italian folk-tale--one of the numerous legends in which a 'cute' and not unkindly sinner escapes not only perdition, but Purgatory, and takes Paradise by storm of wit.[228] A third piece, _Les Sorcieres Espagnoles_, is folklorish in a way likewise, but inferior. Yet another trio remains, and its constituents, _Lokis_, _La Chambre Bleue_, and _Djoumane_, are among Merimee's greatest triumphs. _Djoumane_ is not dated; the other two date from the very last years of his life and of the Second Empire; and, unless I mistake, were written directly to amuse that Imperial Majesty who lives yet, and who, as all good men must hope, may live to see the _revanche_, if not of the dynasty, at any rate of the country, which she did so much to adorn. [Sidenote: _Djoumane._] Of the three, _Djoumane_--the account of a riding dream during a campaign in Algeria--is the slightest, no doubt, and to a certain extent a "trick" story. But it has the usual Merimean consummateness in its own way; and I can give it one testimonial which, like all testimonials, no doubt depends on the importance of the giver, but which, to that extent, is solid. I have read dozens, scores, almost hundreds of dream-stories. I cannot remember a single one, except this, which "took me in" almost to the very awaking.