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 thing after another, as if challenging himself to accomplish a certain end, and then, that end accomplished, he no longer cared to repeat it. That is the scholar's way, not the artist's; and the scholar's instinct is seen, too, in that too purely critical attitude which he adopted, towards others and towards himself, working in almost a hostile fashion upon every impulse, so as to destroy his interest in any part of his work but the way in which it was done. He began his career by two very serious mystifications, _Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul_, a collection of short plays supposed to be translated from the Spanish, and _La Guzla_, a collection of ballads in prose supposed to be translated from the Illyrian. Later on he was, perhaps, a little too anxious to represent himself as having intended from the first to parody the fierceness and the "local colour" of the Romantics. "Vers l'an de grâce 1827 j'étais _romantique_," he says ironically, in the preface of 1840, as he reprints his work of thirteen years ago. "Nous disions aux _classiques_: 'Vos Grecs ne sont point des Grecs; vos Romains ne sont point des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner à vos compositions la _couleur locale_. Point de salut sans _couleur locale_.'" But no doubt he wished from the first to show that he also, by a mere disinterested effort of intelligence, could be as exotic as the Romantics; that Romanticism, like everything else, was a thing that could be done deliberately, done and then dropped. The invention of history and archaeology leads to history and archaeology themselves. Mérimée next produced a piece in dialogue on _La Jacquerie_, in which there is more and better history than drama; then followed his historical novel, the _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._, in which he set himself, as deliberately as usual, to do more carefully what Walter Scott, then a fashion in France, had done with genius. He produced the most perfect of historical novels, and looked about for some new difficulty to conquer.