The idea not unnaturally suggests itself that a certain want of feeling, a certain tendency to cruelty, in Mérimée the man, probably lay at the root of this literary hard-heartedness. It can, however, almost be proved from direct assertions of his own, that the most extravagant manifestations of the quality were originally called forth by his strong aversion to sentimentality in literature. In his essay on the friend of his youth, Victor Jacquemont, we come upon the following passage: "I have never known a more truly feeling heart than Jacquemon's. His was a loving, tender nature; but he took as much pains to conceal his sensibility as others do to dissimulate their evil inclinations. In our youth we had been repelled by the false sentiment of Rousseau and his imitators, and the result in our case was the usual one--an exaggerated reaction. We wished to be strong, and therefore we jeered at sentimentality." It is, nevertheless, self-evident that this hatred of the pathetic, which contrasts so strongly with the extreme sentimentality of most of Mérimée's youthful contemporaries, and this predilection for the violent and the savage, were not purely and simply products of a spirit of contradiction. To gauge the strength of the predilection we have but to glance at the history of Mérimée's development: in another man we should expect to see such a feeling checked in its first outbreaks by the lighter, brighter mood of youth, and tempered in age by waning vigour. But such was not the case with Mérimée. His love of violent solutions is of the same age as his love of pen and ink, and the horrors and terrors with which in the works of his mature manhood his genius produces a tragic effect, become in those of his old age merely gloomy and repulsive.