_The Taking of the Redoubt_ resembles _Carmen_ in this, that the author so completely effaces his personality from the teller of the story, that one finds it easier to suppose than not that the incident was related to him, as he says in the prefatory note, by the officer to whom it happened, and that he merely wrote it down from memory. The concession, however, concedes nothing, as long as the word “memory” is retained in the explanation. For what it stands for here is an imagination that could make the carelessly dropped incident its own, and turn upon it a marvellous sight (lens-eye and light, all in one), until what we read was as clear to Mérimée as it is to us now. Then he wrote it down in the pages that are without a match in the thousands of descriptions of battles that have been written. As one does not go to another for words to describe what one sees oneself, so we need no interpreter of our sensations when we read _The Taking of the Redoubt_. It is for us alone, as Mérimée seems to tell us, to read it or not to read it, to see what took place or not see it. In the list of Mérimée’s stories _Mateo Falcone_ stands immediately before _The Taking of the Redoubt_. Both were published in the same year, in 1829, which was the twenty-sixth of the author’s age. It is so seldom mentioned now in English without Walter Pater’s judgment upon it, “perhaps the cruellest story in the world,” that that might well be added to the name as a sub-title. It would be so, perhaps, if Mérimée had not related it. He himself, despite the cold impassivity that he had schooled himself into maintaining as an author,--he himself shows here and there a trace of the emotion that he arouses in us. The temptation, fall, and punishment of the little child touch indeed the most sensitive nerve in the human heart; the one that can give the keenest pain; that cuts through the heart like a knife. The story would be well-nigh unbearable in another hand than Mérimée’s, or had he told it in a clean, clear thrust of reality, as in _The Taking of the Redoubt_. But he retards the action in the beginning with details and diverts the attention with local colour; not, however, be it remarked, such local colour as he saw with his own eyes, in Spain, but the kind that he learned how to make so easily in the days of _Clara Gazul_ and _La Guzla_, that he lost, as he confesses, all respect for it. Mateo, Gianetto, Gamba, and Giuseppa belong also to the domain of the not seen, not known. But the child, the unfortunate Fortunato, stands out against the artificial background of place, time, and circumstance, with a vividness of reality that, as in _The Taking of the Redoubt_, would make the reality seem vague and indistinct beside it. A few pages of this story might be cited as the highest point that Mérimée attained as an artist.