The inner life of this man, as revealed by his books, is by no means so simple. The character of the youth who went out into the world at eighteen was composed of many conflicting elements. He was exceedingly proud; bold and bashful at the same time. He had an audacious intellect and a shy, reserved disposition. To conceal the shyness, which wounded his pride, he assumed either a stiff, cold manner, or an appearance of frivolity tinged with cynicism. This cynicism became a kind of mannerism with him in conversation with men. As a youth he was certainly not so suspicious and reserved as he afterwards became, but it is a mistake to attribute his general scepticism to any one particular disappointment. He met, like the rest of us, with many disappointments, and was often roughly disillusioned; he was deceived by friends, sacrificed by the woman he loved (d'Haussonville gives particulars in the _Revue des deux Mondes_, 15th August 1877); he learned to know the world, learned that life is warfare, and that a man has not only to protect himself against false and untrustworthy friends, secret and open enemies, but also against those who, as he himself puts it, "do evil for evil's sake." But if the germs of suspicion had not been in him from the first, a dozen consecutive bitter experiences would not have cured him of faith in his fellow-men; for the man of a trustful nature has always had at least an equal number of contrary experiences which outweigh the others. But Mérimée's nature was as critical as it was productive, and men of his character are apt to make the rule by which we judge the professional critic--that he only deserves trust in proportion as he shows distrust--the rule of their lives. We can imagine the suffering which his own poetic impressionability entailed on a man with Mérimée's highly developed critical sense.