[2] The following consecutive sentences will show at a glance how well and how badly Beyle could write: "Ce raisonnement, si juste en apparence, acheva de jeter Mathilde hors d'elle-même. Cette âme altière, mais saturée de toute cette prudence sèche, _qui passe dans le grand monde pour peindre fidèlement le cœur humain_, n'était pas faite pour comprendre si vite le bonheur de se moquer de toute prudence qui peut être si vif pour une âme ardente." One has an idea what the writer means, although the sentence, apart from its clumsy construction, is not even logically correct. But immediately upon it follows one which astonishes us equally by its profundity and its wit: "Dans les hautes classes de la société de Paris, où Mathilde avait vécu, la passion ne peut que bien rarement se dépouiller de la prudence, et c'est du cinquième étage qu'on se jette par la fenêtre." [3] The best appreciations of Beyle are Balzac's criticism of _La Chartreuse_; Taine's of _Rouge et Noir_; Mérimée's notice in the introduction to Beyle's _Correspondance inédite_, somewhat amplified in _Portraits historiques_; Colomb's biographical essay; Sainte-Beuve's two articles in the _Causeries du Lundi_, T. 9; Bussiere's article in _Revue des deux Mondes_ of Jan. 15,1843; Zola's in _Les Romanciers naturalists_; and Paul Bourget's in _Revue Nouvelle_, August 15, 1882. Alfred de Bougy's _Stendhal_ is mere plagiarism and self-assertion. XXI MÉRIMÉE Readers of the present generation--familiar with Victor Hugo's contemptuous allusion to Mérimée in _L'histoire d'une Crime_, and apt to see in Hugo only the rhetorically poetic republican, in Mérimée the polished, sarcastic secretary of the Courts of Love of the Second Empire--find it difficult to realise that these two men, whom literary and political antipathies in course of time separated so widely, belonged in their youth to the same camp, and associated not merely on peaceful but on friendly terms. On one of the bright spring days of Romanticism, the all-seeing sun beheld the studiously correct author of _Mateo Falcone_ in shirt-sleeves and apron in Victor Hugo's kitchen, where, surrounded by the whole family, he gave the cook a successful demonstration in the art of preparing _macaroni à l'italienne_. And we know that on a certain festive evening Hugo, possibly roused to enthusiasm by that same excellent macaroni, made the applicable and flattering anagram, "M. Première Prose," out of the name Prosper Mérimée.[1] Victor Hugo himself, at a later period, would have utterly denied the applicability of the anagram (when Mérimée's sober style happened to be praised in his hearing, he ejaculated, "The sobriety of a weak stomach!"), but it may safely be maintained that it exactly expresses the opinion of the oldest living generation of Frenchmen. In the estimation of the elderly cultured man of the world, no style surpasses Prosper Mérimée's. [Illustration: MÉRIMÉE]