‘She had thrown her mantilla back,’ says Don José in the translated tale, ‘to show her shoulders and a great bunch of acacias that was thrust into her chemise. She had another acacia bloom in the corner of her mouth and she walked along swaying her hips like a filly from the Cordova stud farm. In my country anyone who had seen a woman dressed in that fashion would have crossed himself. In Seville every man paid her some bold compliment on her appearance. She had an answer to each and all with her hand on her hip--“Come, my love,” she began again, “make me seven ells of lace for my mantilla, my pet pin-maker.” And taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me.’ This first meeting of Carmen with the dragoon was pictured in a brilliant hot-looking plaza as if before the cigarette factory in Seville. This woman in throwing the flower at the soldier expressed wonderfully in one fleet moment, by hand and lip and eye, the savage sordid poetry and passionate freedom--that unearthly fragrance--which _is_ Carmen. The film version followed the scenes of the opera rather than the story, which took nothing from the headlong truth of the central figure. But no picturing can equal the star-clarity of Mérimée’s prose in Carmen’s death-scene--a thing of a piercing pathos comparable to nothing I know in writing. ‘After we had gone a little distance I said to her, “So, my Carmen, you are quite ready to follow me, isn’t it so?” She answered, “Yes, I’ll follow you to the death--but I won’t live with you any more.” We had reached a lonely gorge. I stopped my horse. “Is this the place?” she said. And with a spring she reached the ground. She took off her mantilla and threw it at her feet, and stood motionless with one hand on her hip, looking at me steadily. “You mean to kill me, I see that well,” she said. “It is fate. But you’ll never make me give in.” I said to her: “Be rational, I implore you; listen to me. All the past is forgotten. Yet you know it is you who have been my ruin--it is because of you that I am a robber and a murderer. Carmen, my Carmen, let me save you, and save myself with you.” “José,” she answered, “what you ask is impossible. I don’t love you any more. You love me still and that is why you want to kill me. If I liked I might tell you some other lie, but I don’t choose to give myself the trouble. Everything is over between us two. You are my rom and you have the right to kill your romi, but Carmen will always be free. A calli she was born and a calli she’ll die.” “Then you love Lucas?” I asked. “Yes, I have loved him--as I loved you--for an instant--less than I loved you, perhaps. And now I don’t love anything. And I hate myself for ever having loved you.”