Notice, finally, that at no time does the author force himself on our notice that he may emphasise the lesson, but remains in the background, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. He effaces himself even deliberately so as to appear altogether absent. Future readers will show consideration for a host so polite, so graceful, so discreet in doing the honours of his own home. Good manners are at all times pleasing, and a more courteous host than Mérimée it would be impossible to find. Greeting his guests at the threshold, he introduces them and then withdraws, leaving them at liberty to examine and to criticise undisturbed. He is not obtrusive; he does not call attention to his treasures; never will he be caught in the act of a display of vanity. Instead of exposing his knowledge, he conceals it; to listen to him, it would seem as if any one at all might have written his book. Now it is an anecdote related to him by one of his friends, and which he has transcribed on the spot; now it is “a selection” from Brantôme, and from d’Aubigné. If he wrote _The Experiments of an Adventurer_, it was because he had once, for a fortnight, had nothing better to do. For writing _The Guzla_, the recipe is simple: to procure statistics referring to Illyria, to get the travels of the Abbé Fortis, and to learn five or six Slav words. This resolution not to over-estimate himself comes to be in the end an affectation. So great is his dread of appearing pedantic that he flies to the opposite extreme, and the result is his tone of flippancy, his unceremonious manner of the man of society. The day may come when this will prove to be his vulnerable point, when it will be asked whether this perpetual air of irony is not intentional; whether he is justified in joking in the very midst of tragedy; whether his apparent callousness is not due to the fear of ridicule; whether his free-and-easy tone is not the effect of embarrassment; whether the gentleman has not been harmful to the author; whether his art was sufficiently dear to him. On more than one occasion, notably in _The Venus of Ille_, he availed himself of this to mystify the reader. Elsewhere, in Lokis,[4] a grotesque idea, with double meaning, lies at the foundation of the tale, like a toad in a chiselled casket. He seemed to find delight in seeing a woman’s fingers unlock the casket, and a pretty face terrified by the sight of some object of loathing made him laugh. It appears that he wrote almost always at random, to amuse himself, to pass the time, without allowing himself to be swayed by an idea, with no conception of a great unity of purpose, with no self-subordination to his work. In this, as in all else, he was disenchanted, and we find him finally out of tune with life. Scepticism engenders melancholy; and in this regard his correspondence is truly depressing. His health failed gradually; he spent his winters regularly at Cannes, realising that life was slipping away from him.