Two characteristic feelings lie at the root of Mérimée's disinclination to apprehend and treat the trenchant catastrophes in human life as tragic catastrophes; the one is a kind of fear that the trenchancy which he loves will lose its edge by the introduction of a reconciling element; the other is his disbelief in a greater, comprehensive whole, of which the single incident forms a part. When he produces, as he at times does, a genuinely tragic effect, it happens almost against his will, and is the result of a more mature and profound understanding of the human soul, and of a sympathy, growing with his growing experience of life, for cases in which there is a necessary connection between character and destiny. In his romance of the days of Charles IX., when he makes the one brother fall by the hand of the other, he, the scorner of the symbolic, as a matter of fact represents all the folly and horror of the religious and civil war in one melodramatically tragic, symbolical picture. And when, in the little tale _La Partie de Trictrac_, the unfortunate officer who has cheated on one solitary occasion becomes so miserable in the consciousness of his shame that he is driven to commit suicide, the story imperceptibly assumes the character of a tragedy of honour. In another little work of art, _La double Méprise_, Mérimée endeavours to represent the web of chance events, of conflicting and wrongly comprehended instincts, which make life so meaningless, and even what is saddest as foolish as it is sad and hideous; but as he unfolds the inner history of the painful incident, and as we by degrees learn that that which seemed foolish was inevitable, it ceases to be foolish. The gist of the story is that a young married woman, Julie de Chaverny, whose dissatisfaction with her married life is developing into actual unhappiness, is led by a chain of ideas and emotions, slight in themselves, but welded together like links of iron, to give herself to a man whom she in reality does not love, and then to take her own life. Mérimée's art displays itself in this case in the calm assurance with which he takes his reader's hand and leads him through the labyrinth of all these ideas and emotions to a climax which is as inevitable as it is illogical. Two inimitable passages are the conversation in which Darcy arouses Julie's enthusiastic admiration by the modesty and humour with which he unwillingly recounts his own gallant deeds, and the conversation in the carriage, during which every utterance of Julie's, her resistance even more than her confessions, brings her nearer to her fall. The situation is summed up in the following classic sentence, prepared for by everything that has gone before: "The unfortunate woman believed at this moment in all sincerity that she had always loved Darcy; that she had felt the same ardent attachment to him during all the six years of his absence as she did at that instant." Mérimée