Prosper Mérimée is one of a handful of French writers credited with inventing the nouvelle, something more than a short story but less than a novel. His first exercise in this genre was Colomba (1840), a much-acclaimed tale about a vendetta set in Corsica. Carmen may be seen as an attempt to repeat the success of the earlier story by mixing similar ingredients: an exotic and colorful setting; a central character who operates outside the law but with reference to some definite code of honor; and, of course, a bewitching femme fatale.

The thematic materials in Carmen are somewhat reminiscent of the gothic novels that flourished a generation before, novels that were often set in wild places haunted by colorful characters. The form of its plot and the manner of its narration are, however, very different from the florid excesses of gothic melodrama. The plot of Carmen is borrowed from the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731, 1733, 1753; Manon Lescaut, 1734, 1786), which tracks the moral decline of a supposedly honorable man who becomes infatuated with an altogether unsuitable woman. Mérimée’s narrative style is laconic and rather clinical, full of anthropological asides regarding the customs and language of the Gypsies. Most of these asides, as Mérimée admits, are lifted from the early works of the English writer George Henry Borrow, author of The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies in Spain (1841). The result of Mérimée’s syncretic amalgamation is a work delicately suspended between realism and Romanticism, a kind of work that had not previously existed and that Mérimée made his own.

In Manon Lescaut’s account, a worthy man’s descent into ruin is attributed to an oppressive, almost tangible force operating within a context defined by the author’s Jesuitical Catholicism. Carmen, too, is marked by fatalism, but the fate that pursues Don José is no dark, oppressive one. His decline, which occurs over a series of dispirited failures, begins even before he meets Carmen, for he has fled his homeland after killing a man in a duel fought over a tennis match. When Carmen tempts him, Don José knows precisely where his duty lies, yet by capitulating again and again, he eventually becomes so casual in his immorality as to plot and execute the murder of Carmen’s supposed husband on a whim rather than as an act of true desperation.

The only resistance Don José can raise against his temptress is displayed in the frame narrative, when he refuses to murder the archaeologist to whom he eventually tells his life story. He is restrained by the fact that the archaeologist previously saved him from being captured. This raises the doubt as to whether Don José is entirely reliable as a narrator or whether his matter-of-factness represents the state of mind instilled by the imminence of his execution. Most of the events he describes speak for themselves, however, and they make sense only if one accepts that they happened as casually as he describes them.

Don José’s fatalism matches Carmen’s, especially in the remarkable conclusion of the story, which differs sharply not only from that of Manon Lescaut but also from those of such nineteenth century recapitulations of that plot as La Dame aux camélias (1848; Camille, 1857) by Alexandre Dumas, fils . Carmen knows that Don José will kill her, but she refuses to save herself by lying, even though she built her entire career on conscienceless deception. In effect, she not only invites destruction but also insists on it, and she does so not out of principle...