He who misleads by keeping silence is obliged sooner or later to speak, and the mystifier of the public is in the end compelled to admit it into his confidence and bear its criticism. But there is a more impenetrable kind of armour than either silence or mystification, namely irony, and in it Mérimée, like Beyle, clad himself. There was a satirical vein in his writing from the first; for his ardent admiration for primitive strength of character naturally involved contempt for phrasemongers. Such a play as _Les Mécontents_, for instance, contains as bitter a satire as ever was penned upon drawing-room revolutionists. A set of Royalist provincial noblemen, old imbeciles whose one passion is to hear themselves speak, concoct a conspiracy against the First Empire; they determine to distribute inflammatory pamphlets, they arrange secret signals, draw up plans of procedure, and quarrel for the presidency at their meetings, but disperse incontinently at the mere sight of a gendarme. A play of much later date, _Les deux Héritages ou Don Quichotte_ (which probably served Émile Augier as a model for some of his dramas), contains an analogous satire upon social and religious hypocrisy, political humbug, the cold, calculating, unchivalrous spirit of a youthful generation, comparing himself with which Mérimée must have been tempted to call himself an idealist and enthusiast. But in these dramatic works, the faulty construction of which is apparent even to the reader, the irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is absent. In them he lays on the colour too thickly; it is as the novelist that he really excels. Far more delicate than the irony of his dramas is, for instance, that of the charming little story _L'abbé Aubain_, a work which proves the versatility of Mérimée's talent, for in it he writes almost like Edmond About, only with much greater elegance. _L'abbé Aubain_ is a short series of letters, some of them written by a lady who supposes herself to be beloved by a young abbé, the rest by the abbé, who jests constrainedly on the subject of the lady's attachment to him. We make the acquaintance of two weak, refined characters, who lie to each other, to themselves, and to the world, and whose little dainty, easy-going passions and counterfeit self-control are the subject of the silent satire of the author.