Technically it is a tale, with the picture-phrases of the sketch. It is a marvellous brief story rather than a marvellous short-story, which, as I have before remarked, must exhibit more plot, more complication, with its consequent dénouement, than is found in either the tale or the sketch. As a work of art, it ranks with the author’s most vivid stories. In the memorable phrase of Walter Pater, “Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon’s mouth.” Before reading the story itself in translation, some explanatory words may be helpful. It is interesting to note the device which Mérimée uses to add reality to his narrative--he tells us that the story, the characters, the place, the fight, are real. Even those who stand in the wings, flitting across the stage but once as if to say, “I am flesh and blood, and not a mere stuffed figure like the doll whose only pains were in her sawdust”--even they have names and personalities dimly veiled under the initial and the dash. Mérimée’s friend, the “military man” from whom he got the story, is Henri Marie Beyle--who called himself de Stendhal. Stendhal was a somewhat prolific author, but it was _La Chartreuse de Parme_ (1839) that brought him fame. As a romantic tragi-comedy, dealing with Italy in the Napoleonic era, it is worth a reading, but particularly because the so-called _Épisode de Waterloo_ (in chapters 3 and 4) reveals the measurable debt which Mérimée owed to his friend. Stendhal was indeed “a military man.” He first smelled powder in the Marengo campaign (1800), and served long in Napoleon’s armies. But he was actually present in 1812 at the assault upon Cheverino, in the Moscow campaign, and doubtless he afterward poured its dramatic story red-hot into the soul of Mérimée. In another detail also Mérimée departs from fact--Stendhal died in Paris in 1842 of apoplexy, and not of “a fever in Greece;” but surely that is a mild variation for a fictionist. “The 4th September” is also true to the actual, since the battle of Borodino took place on the 7th, and the arrival at Moscow on the 14th, 1812. “General B----” is General Berthier, chief-of-staff for Napoleon in the Moscow campaign. “Madame de B----” has been identified as Madame de Boigne, the intimate of Madame Récamier, and a resident of the rue de Provence. In her salon Mérimée read aloud many of his stories before publication. Other critics suggest that “Madame B----” is Madame (la comtesse) de Beaulaincourt, and support this contention by referring to a collection of eleven letters addressed to this noble dame by Mérimée, and later published. Finally, “General C----” is that famous Napoleonic soldier, Jean Dominique Compans, who actually commanded the 57th and the 61st regiments at Cheverino.