In this same _Colomba_, which is Mérimée's most famous work, Romantic "local colouring" celebrates its most signal triumph. The story is pervaded by the genuine aroma of Bonaparte's native isle, and breathes the genuine Corsican spirit. As a proof of the fidelity with which Corsican customs are reproduced, as well as of the popularity of the book, it may be mentioned that when Mérimée was waiting in court to hear the verdict in the Libri case, a Corsican ex-bandit came forward from among the audience and quietly offered, in case of the verdict being given against him, to revenge him by assassinating the president of the court. Better evidence of the correctness of Mérimée's colouring could hardly be required. But Mérimée would not have been Mérimée if he had not (at the very time when he was publishing _Colomba_) saved his reputation as the enemy of all theories by making merry over this same much-talked-of "local colouring." In the preface, written in 1840, to the second edition of _La Guzla_, his collection of fictitious Illyrian popular songs and ballads, he tells that, "in the year of grace 1827," he was a Romanticist with an enthusiasm for local colour, nay, the firm belief that without it there was no salvation. By local colouring he and his comrades meant what in the seventeenth century went by the name of "manners" (_mœurs_); but they were very proud of their word, and imagined themselves to be the inventors of the thing as well as the word. His devotion to local colouring inspired him with the desire to visit Illyria; want of money was the chief obstacle to his carrying out his wish; the idea occurred to him to write a description of his travels in anticipation and pay for the tour with the profits of his book; but he gave up this bold plan, and instead manufactured, with the assistance of a guide-book and the knowledge "of five or six Slavonic words," a collection of "ballads translated from the Illyrian." Everyone was deceived.[2] A German savant of the name of Gerhardt actually translated _Guzla_ (along with two other volumes of Slavonic poetry) into German, and this, moreover, in the original metre, which he had been able to trace in the French translator's prose. After Mérimée had thus discovered how easily "local colouring" may be obtained, he forgave Racine and the Classicists their lack of it.