Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other, in the first instance, in their love of fact. All Mérimée's readers know that what he presents them with is the bare, accurately demonstrable fact, the exactly drawn detail. All that he cares for in history, as he himself confesses in his _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._, are the anecdotes; and of these he prefers the kind which illustrate the manners and types of character of the period. Exactly the same can be said of Beyle. Anecdote is positively the natural form of his thought; he thinks in anecdotes. He paints the individual in anecdotes, the period in biographies. His aversion for the vague leads him to write the kind of history which seems to him most full of life, in other words, to communicate fact in the form of a novel, or of a short, realistic drama. And the pithy, short anecdotes which he relates are never commonplace, but invariably the striking expression of some essential fact. In so far the resemblance to Mérimée is marked. When a modern admirer of Beyle (Paul Heyse) praises his short Italian tales, "in which strong, reckless passions assert themselves without any self-deception, and take their course with a fiery, or cold, heedlessness of consequences, prepared in the last resort to have recourse to the knife," we feel that these expressions might, without the alteration of a word, be applied to Mérimée's stories. Nevertheless, a story as communicated by Mérimée conveys such a different meaning from a story as communicated by Beyle, that it is easy to determine the limits of the elder man's influence upon the younger. Beyle's salient characteristic is the tendency to generalise. The trait of character which is exhibited in any given action, is to him only an instance; it illustrates a psychological law, or is the evidence of certain social conditions or racial peculiarities, which it is of great consequence to him to elucidate. When, for example, he fills his book _De l'Amour_ to repletion with anecdotes, he does it merely for the purpose of showing, in a practical and impressive manner, what he means by the different names which he gives to the different varieties of the passion and their different stages of development. To obtain the reader's assent to the conclusions he draws, he presents his material, his arguments, in the form of anecdotes. In his novels this tendency to generalise has almost a distracting effect. He too frequently explains to his reader: "She acted in such and such a manner because she was an Italian; a Parisian would of course have acted very differently."