Mérimée does not write for the "bourgeois," into whose eyes the slightest emotion brings tears; he addresses himself to people of stronger nerves, who require more violent shocks to move them. Therefore away with the regulation lengthy introductions, and all the preparations and omens of tragedy! Human beings with blood in their veins do not deliberate so long; and nervous weakness is not an interesting spectacle to any but the neurotic. If a woman loves, what can be more natural than that she should say so, and, regardless of every other consideration, make the intervals between the first avowal, the first kiss, and the first embrace as short as possible? If a man hates with a manly hatred, what more natural than that he should put an end to his torment and his enemy's life with a stab or a shot? It is, undoubtedly, natural, when the race which the author chooses to depict is not an effete, but a vigorous one; and this is the explanation of Mérimée's tendency to give to every feeling the character of a fierce passion, to dwell upon what is cruel and hard, to make death--not tragedy death, but real death, in all its cold, hard pitilessness--the dénouement of every tale which he sends out from his artist's workshop. It explains what may be summed up in a word as _l'atroce_ in his writings. He is familiar with death. If the old designations were applicable in his case, we should call him a great tragic author; but Mérimée does not believe in what dogmatic upholders of Aristotelian principles call tragic expiation. Concerning the representation of death in the works of other authors he seems to say with Schiller: "Aber der Tod, Ihr Herrn, ist so ästhetisch doch nicht." Deepest down in his soul lies the love of strength. But he does not, like Balzac, love strength in the shape of strong desire, strong passions; he loves it in the form of original force of character and of stirring, decisive event; and therefore he naturally begins by feeling and reproducing the poetry of decisive event, long before he is mature enough to represent that of simple, strong character. Of all events, death is the most decisive; and hence it is that he falls in love with death--not, be it observed, with death as it is conceived of by spiritualists and believers, not with death as a purifying passage to another existence, but as a violent, sudden, bloody termination. Like Sièyes, he is for _la mort sans phrase_.