Among French masters of the short-story, Prosper Mérimée easily holds rank in the first group. Both personality and genius are his, and both well repay scrutiny. Stendhal has given us a picture of Mérimée as a “young man in a gray frock-coat, very ugly, and with a turned-up nose.... This young man had something insolent and extremely unpleasant about him. His eyes, small and without expression, had always the same look, and this look was ill-natured.... Such was my first impression of the best of my present friends.” An examination of at least eight several portraits of Mérimée indicates that Stendhal’s picture is far from flattering, yet no one ever charged Mérimée with being pretty. Our author was born in Paris, September 28, 1803. His father, Jean François, was a cultivated artist and a writer of some ability. While professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, the elder Mérimée married Anne Moreau, a pupil. She was a successful painter of children, and often kept them in quiet pose by telling them stories. Her grandmother, Madame de Beaumont, had long before endeared herself to children of all time by writing “Beauty and the Beast.” The Mérimée home naturally attracted the artists and celebrities of many lands, so that Prosper was reared in an air of refinement and inspiration. Versatile from childhood, Mérimée took to drawing like a fine-arts pupil, passed through college, was successful in his law examinations, and at an early age took up literature as a vocation. His career was seconded by many journeys abroad, where he served his country particularly as man of letters, art critic, and archæologist. At home he received important public recognition, notably membership in the French Academy and appointment as a Senator of France. This latter honor evidenced the warm personal esteem of the Empress Eugénie, whom he had known as a girl in Spain, and at whose court--in the reign of Napoleon III--he was received as an intimate rather than as a courtier. Notwithstanding his reticence, everywhere his friends were many and distinguished, for scarcely any other Frenchman ever labored so brilliantly in capacities collateral with literature and yet attained to such a pinnacle of many-sided authorship. He died at Cannes, September 23, 1870, lacking five days of rounding out his sixty-seventh year. Those who would know somewhat of Mérimée’s spirit must read his _Letters to an Unknown Woman_--letters covering thirty-nine years of his life. For the first nine years the correspondents never met, but when at length they did, it was to love; and though during the succeeding thirty years the affection cooled, there never failed a solid attachment, and the last letter to his _Inconnue_ was penned but two hours before his death. True, in these epistles the author is always the literary artist expressing the moods of a man and a lover, and so is never to be taken quite unawares, yet all his traits are disclosed with sufficient openness to show the real man.