[In the following essay, Raitt summarizes the importance of historical authenticity to Mérimeé 's fictional works.]

Prosper Mérimée, born in 1803, grew up at a time when historical studies in France were coming to enjoy enormous popularity, both in their own right and as an apparently inexhaustible source of inspiration for imaginative literature. His was the generation of such illustrious representatives of the new school of historiography as Michelet, Augustin Thierry and Thiers, the same generation as those novelists and dramatists like Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Dumas and George Sand who, following the success of the Waverley novels and Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs, avidly battened on history for their subjects. But he is almost unique among his contemporaries in standing poised between the two sides of the Romantic enthusiasm for history: a pretext for picturesque excursions into far-off times and an earnest desire for a precise knowledge of the past. Eminent both as a novelist and as an historian, Mérimée exemplifies in unusually acute form the hesitations and dilemmas of a period in which history, having first served to stimulate the imagination, gradually seemed to be strangling it.

At the beginning of his literary career, Mérimée's interests were confined to works of imagination, and for half a decade after the appearance in 1825 of his first publication, the pseudo-Spanish dramas of Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul, novels, tales, prose poems and plays followed each other in such profusion that his friend Jean-Jacques Ampère remarked admiringly in Le National in 1830 that 'the ease of his talent is such that it appears exhaustless'.¹ But during the 1830's, his production of literary works slackened and, little by little, gave way to archaeological and historical investigations. His first brief historical essay on Henri de Guise dates from 1835, and his first major historical study, Essai sur la Guerre Sociale, was begun in 1838 and appeared in 1841. This was intended as the prologue to a life of Julius Caesar, and was followed in 1844 by La Conjuration de Catilina,dealing with the early years of Caesar's political life. The projected third volume never saw the light of day, and the material he had accumulated for it was eventually turned over to his imperial master, Napoleon III, for use in his self-adulatory Vie de César. In November 1843, the solid erudition of La Guerre Socialeearned Mérimée a seat in the Académie des Inscriptions; the official acknowledgement of his distinction as a historian came sooner than the equivalent crowning of his efforts as a creator of fiction, since his election to the French Academy did not take place until March 1844. Though two of his most famous short novels, Colomba and Carmen, both date from the early 1840's, he soon abandoned imaginative writing altogether: there is a gap of twenty years between L'Abbé Aubain in 1846 and La Chambre bleue in 1866. History occupied him more and more, and in 1848 he published the Histoire de Don Pèdre Ier, roi de Castille, usually regarded as his most substantial historical achievement. In the 1850's, he turned his attention from ancient Rome and medieval Spain to Russia, producing at irregular intervals works on Les Faux Démétrius (1853), Stenka Razine (1861), Bogdan Chmielnicki (1863) and Peter the Great (1864-8). These later volumes are much less original than his contributions to Roman and Spanish studies. Working on second-hand sources hampered by an imperfect knowledge of Russian, ignorant of the country itself, he was largely content to abridge the findings of Russian historians and arrange them in narrative form; and, though he has the merit of being the first writer in France to take a serious interest in Russian history, his reputation as an historian rests on his earlier researches. The substitution of history for fiction as Mérimée's main creative preoccupation is thus a gradual but almost complete process (except for a brief and not particularly happy return to the short story when he was an old and ailing man). How and why did it come about that one of the most significant and successful novelists of his time laid aside his art for the related craft of the historian?

To answer this question, it is necessary to establish why Mérimée was ever prompted to write. 'The mania of writing, a very contagious one, has seized me,' he declared to an English friend in 1825, and it was a mania that thereafter never left him. Though most people now know only a small proportion of what he wrote, his production was very considerable—books and articles on art, on archaeology, on travel, on literature, on numismatics, on architecture, numerous translations from the Russian and a vast correspondence running to over 5,000 known letters, as well as the works of history and fiction. Through the greater part of this, even in the more specialized forms of erudition, there runs one constant thread: the understanding of the human heart. Again and again in his letters, Mérimée repeats that the quirks of human behaviour excite him more than anything else. In 1832, he laid claim to 'an insatiable curiosity about all the varieties of the human species', and in 1855 he summed up his career as a writer in these words: 'all I have ever done is to paint portraits. When I was young, I used to love to dissect human hearts to see what was inside them.' A few years later, he echoed the same idea when he described his writings as 'paintings of the human heart', and asserted to Mme de La Rochejaquelein that the study of the human heart was still what interested him most. In 1860, urging Jenny Dacquin to send him detailed accounts of her impressions of life in Algeria, he reminded her that 'everything to do with the history of humanity is full of interest for me'. Towards the end of his life, when the inexorable disintegration of his health had warned him that the end was not far distant, one of his regrets was the interruption of his observations on human psychology: 'when one has a taste for the study of the human heart, it is very sad to die without having found the solution to some interesting problems.' This incessant preoccupation with the oddities of the behaviour of mankind puts Mérimée squarely in the tradition of the great French moralistes; he belongs to the same family of minds as lucid analysts of mores like La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyére, Montesquieu or Chamfort.

But Mérimée differs from them in one essential respect: his profound mistrust of generalization. Where the moralistes of the seventeenth century, and even of the eighteenth, had been anxious to deduce universal principles from specific observations, Mérimée's cautious scepticism led him to withhold credence from anything save precise, individual cases. Sainte-Beuve said of him that 'in conversation, no one was ever more sparing of ideas in the proper sense of the word', and the same is true of his writings. What fascinates him is the individual case, and it is for this reason that he is so attached to telling stories, each of which constitutes a unique specimen of the vagaries of humanity. In his Caractères, La Bruyère declares: 'One of the signs of a mediocre mind is to be always telling stories,' and in the margin of his copy, Sainte-Beuve, perspicacious and uncharitable as ever, noted simply: 'Mérimée.' In fact, Mérimée's irresistible predilection for story-telling is the product of an intense and intelligent curiosity about humanity allied with a scepticism so radical that only the barest statements seemed proof against its corrosiveness. Like many other writers who have been particularly drawn to the short-story form, from Maupassant to Maugham, Mérimée loved collecting examples of human idiosyncrasy, while cautiously declining to offer explanations for them. The result is that a large proportion of what he wrote deals with the action of psychology in individuals, presented without commentary or diagnosis.

At first, Mérimée satisfied this taste by making up tales, cast either in narrative or dramatic form—his plays, far from being intended for the stage, are in reality stories filleted of all but the dialogue—and the essential interest of these early works lies in their exemplification of the paradoxes inherent in human motives. But even in these fictional creations there is a solid foundation of historical data. Local colour is a preoccupation that Mérimée shared with most of his contemporaries; for him, however, it had to be based, wherever possible, on known fact. How accurate the historical colouring might be in his lost Cromwell we shall never know, but there is careful documentation of a little-known episode of the Napoleonic campaigns in Les Espagnols en Danemarck (1825), and a sound if tendentiously interpreted knowledge of medieval history in La Jaquerie (1828). Even more impressive is the historical acumen displayed in the Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1829), usually agreed to be the greatest of French historical novels of the Romantic period. There are inevitably gaps and anachronisms: Mérimée has transposed d'Aubigné's account of the raffinés, of the turn of the century to thirty years before, George de Mergy's incredulity is more a reflection of the author's hostility to religion than of sixteenth-century attitudes, and the explanation of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day given in the preface is surprisingly contradicted in the novel itself. Despite these defects, Mérimée has treated the historical background of the book much more scrupulously than contemporaries such as Hugo and Vigny—to say nothing of Dumas—who were less concerned with accuracy than with propounding theses or generating excitement. Indeed, Mérimée goes so far to claim that his work consists merely of 'an extract from my reading'. But he also defines with remarkable clarity the nature of his interest in history: 'in history, anecdotes are all I like, and among them I prefer those where I think I can find an accurate depiction of manners and characters at a given time . . . Only memoirs, which are intimate conversations between author and reader, provide me with those portrayals of man which entertain me and interest me.' And it is precisely this that dominates the Chronique: plot is reduced to a minimum and so constructed as to give a representative picture of manners and mental attitudes in the 1570's. Louis Maigron, the leading analyst of the French historical novel, even argues that 'all the interest of the Chronique comes from its faithful reproduction of manners', and while this view does less than justice to the skill of the narration, the colourfulness of the action and the incisiveness of the style, it is undeniably right in identifying Mérimée's prime concern in the novel.

The same is true, if somewhat less obviously, of several shorter fictional works of the next few years, which are likewise founded on an historical reality observed and assessed with detached precision. L'Enlèvement de la redoute (1829) treats of an incident in the Russian campaign of 1812, perhaps related to Mérimée by an eye-witness, and La Vision de Charles XI (1829) was suggested by a document in the archives of the Swedish Foreign Ministry. In 1841, Mérimée produced his Colomba by a cunning amalgam of attested incidents, salient traits of the Corsican character, and a plot contrived to bring out what is most typical in the individuals involved. In Arsène Guillot (1844), an analogous technique is applied to certain sectors of contemporary French society. For Mérimée, the art of fiction is as often as not a narrative arrangement and heightening of a spectrum of mores at a given point in time.

But from the outset of his career, there are signs that Mérimée's attitude to fiction is equivocal. Always alive to the dangers of ridicule, he is uncomfortably aware that, compared with history, fiction can be represented as a gratuitous invention with no firm base in reality. However strongly he may by instinct have felt himself impelled to create fictional entities, one suspects that he would have found it difficult to refute the proposition that novelists are liars. It is thus as a measure of self-protection against the absurdity of telling tales known to be factually untrue that he adopts the risky device of indicating that he is himself fully conscious of their falsity. The element of pretence inherent in all art is regularly and deliberately emphasized by Mérimée; the reader is taken behind the scenes and invited to inspect the mechanism of deception. Cromwell showed puppets taking the parts of the historical characters. Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul presented plays supposedly written by a Spanish actress in exile, but the mask was designed to be transparent. Similarly, La Guzla passed off spurious Illyrian ballads as the work of a bard-cum-out-law, picturesquely named Hyacinthe Maglanovich. La Famille de Carvajal is prefaced by two letters allegedly from members of the public, but so obviously faked that no one could be taken in. All these external tricks are intended to confuse the reader about the degree of seriousness with which Mérimée takes his own work. Once the hoax is discovered, we may be tempted to think—as Mérimée would wish us to—that he has simply been perpetrating a pastiche or a parody, and he is consequently able to be serious under cover of being flippant. In the Chronique, the exposure of the sham element takes place within the work itself, and the action of the novel is interrupted for a Dialogue entre le lecteur et l'auteur, which consists of a lively but obtrusive debate on the problems of the historical novel. At the end, too, we are abruptly reminded that we are dealing with invention and not reality, when the novel closes with the words: 'Did Mergy ever get over it? Did Diane take another lover? I leave it to the reader to decide, so that in any event he can make the novel end as he wishes.' This insistence on pointing out that art is mere feigning is paralleled by a casual admission that history is a more reputable intellectual activity: 'I wish I had the skill to write a history of France; I would not bother with tales.' So even in the years when Mérimée was devoting himself to imaginative literature, the canker of doubt was present in his art. Too respectful of historical method to adopt Vigny's separation of the 'truth of art' from the 'truthfulness of fact', he was already inclined to believe that the stuff of history was reality, and that of art 'mere' fancy.

This respect for the factual nature of history was reinforced when, in 1834, Mérimée became Inspector-General of Historic Monuments. His immense task of identifying, classifying and preserving the architectural relics of the nation's past compelled him to become something of a professional historian, and the four volumes of Notes de Voyage, which he published between 1835 and 1840, necessitated considerable historical research and contain a large amount of historical information. Though he had not yet renounced imaginative literature, the correspondence of those years shows an increasingly disdainful attitude towards it. In 1836 he told a friend: 'Years ago I gave up writing for the general public. Now I turn out pretty obscure archaeological memoirs read by a handful of learned men, half of whom shrug their shoulders at them,' and two years later, as he began his studies on Caesar, he announced: 'I am working at something more serious than my old pranks . . . I am a pedant by profession and I'm beginning to become one by taste.' It is symptomatic of his changing interests that he campaigned for the Académie des Inscriptions before trying the Academy, and that to attract votes at the former institution he was ready to declare that his only concern was with works of erudition. Indeed, erudite preoccupations invade two of the best fictional works of this period. In La Vénus d'Ille (1837), Mérimée portrays himself as a desiccated archaeologist arguing about philological minutiae, and in the opening section of Carmen (1845), he appears as an ancient historian searching for the site of the battle of Munda. Justifiable though these references may be in the economy of the two tales, they only just avoid ponderousness, and Stendhal thought that twenty lines too much on epigraphy tipped La Vénus d'Ille over into aridity. But it is the revised edition of Carmen in 1847 which most clearly reveals the extent of Mérimée's disaffection with fiction. To what is without doubt his most powerful and passionate creation, he now appends a scholarly but wilfully irrelevant disquisition on the language of the gypsies, leading up to the ironic comment: 'That is quite enough to give the readers of Carmen a flattering idea of my studies on Romany.' He concludes with a gypsy proverb to the effect that keeping one's mouth shut is the best way of stopping the flies getting in. This effectively discredits the fiction that has gone before—why should we attach any significance to what the author treats with such ostentatious indifference? Thereafter, Mérimée follows his own advice and for twenty years, so far as fiction is concerned, keeps his lips tightly closed.

In the meantime, history had taken its place so completely that in 1856 it was possible for him to say, with perfect sincerity: 'I wrote so many novels in years gone by that now I only like history.' But history as he conceived it fulfilled exactly the same need as fiction had done: the unslaked thirst for anecdotes. For Mérimée, historical writing consists of gripping linear narrative, demonstrating the variety of human eccentricity, satisfying a longing for exoticism and violence, and exploring the diversity of mores. Economics and sociology are of little moment to him; he is not much interested in tracing large-scale processes or movements; philosophizing about history—as so many historians of his time loved to do—is shunned like the plague. As he told Edward Lee Childe, 'a philosophy of history is an absurd notion. Obviously, when the same causes occur, the same effects are likely to follow, the heart of man being the same in every age and every land; but it is dangerous and narrow-minded to reduce everything to a system.' For him, history should record not only political events, but also 'the facts which reveal the mores and characters of the men of past epochs'. The human element is very much to the fore: 'for my part, I know of no more interesting problem than the complete dissection of a historical character.' History presents the same attraction as drama, he explains in a lengthy review of George Grote's History of Greece in 1847. 'Outside school, if by good fortune we remember something of what we were taught there, ancient history can become the most fascinating reading. . . . No one can fail to take an interest in the interplay of passions, in portraits of those great characters who dominate whole peoples, in the alternations of glory and ignominy which, from close at hand, are known as chance, but which, seen together and from afar, appear as the embodiment of terrible and mysterious laws of humanity.' Passions, portraits, the understanding of humanity—such, for Mérimée, is the stuff of history, as it had been before of imaginative literature. Essentially, history is drama, a conception underlined by his invariable habit of centring his historical works on outstanding individuals rather than critical periods or long evolutions—Julius Caesar, Don Pedro, Demetrius, Bogdan Chmielnicki, Stenka Razine or Peter the Great. Mérimée is speaking very much of his own practice when, commenting on W. H. Prescott's History of the Reign of Philip II, he writes: 'For an author as for the reader, it is a piece of great good fortune to come across one of those characters who dominate the times in which they live and who, like the protagonists of ancient tragedies, are at the centre of the peripeteia and continually hold the stage.'

But if history seen in this light has all the features of drama, it rises superior to fiction because it concerns itself with facts and not fancies, and facts are for Mérimée the essential preoccupation of the historian. In 1856, he solemnly affirmed: 'in my eyes, history is something sacred'; factual truth is sacrosanct, and the cardinal sin is to tamper with it, whether in the name of morality or in subservience to some abstract theory. The historian's prime aim should be 'the discovery of the truth'; vain embellishments and preconceived ideas must be forsworn. The overriding duty of a historian is to be 'detached and fair'; his function is not to prove a thesis but to 'collect numerous facts and subject them to impartial criticism'. In 1848 he again insisted that 'what one demands of history nowadays is sureness of critical evaluation and impartiality of judgement'. In his view, the according of primacy to the establishment of facts was the great contribution which his own times had made to historiography. 'The progress made by historical studies since the beginning of this century consists in having perfected methods of research and the art of criticism, and that is, to my mind, one of the claims to glory which the literature of our times will have in the sight of posterity.' Naturally, with this severe opinion of the object to which the historian should bend his energies, he rigorously proscribes the admixture of what is imagined to what is known, an offence which he castigates in German historiography: 'The Germans have committed the worst possible crime; they've brought imagination into a subject where it had no place: history'. The respective domains of history and fiction are thus strictly circumscribed; the interest they provide may be identical, but the matter from which they derive it is on no account to be confused. Only once does Mérimée derogate from this principle, in Les Débuts d'un Aventurier, in which he uses dramatic form to give a highly speculative account of the unknown early years of the Demetrius impostor. But while the fact that the career of Demetrius acts as the basis for dramatic scenes as well as for a conventional history shows that both genres supply him with the same kind of pleasure, the difference in form ensures that the reader can be in doubt about what is certain and what is admittedly guesswork. Apart from this one deviation, Mérimée now has little but scorn for anything which is not provably true, and in 1859, after the distress caused by Valentine Delessert's desertion had prevented him from writing for some years, he said with truth: 'When I stopped writing, history was the only sort of literature that still interested me.' But perhaps the clearest demonstration of the distinction he now so firmly draws between history and fiction occurs when in 1860 he writes to congratulate Thiers on the latest volume of his Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire: 'History, when it is written as you can write it, is as much superior to all poems and all plays as a diamond is to paste.' History does not do more than fiction or drama; what it does is in essence the same, but with the inestimable advantage of factual authenticity. History is genuine; fiction is spurious.

Mérimée's initial hesitation over a compromise between history and fiction is thus eventually resolved by a categorical verdict in favour of the former. No longer are he and his readers subject to the reproach of gullibility, since he only deals in documents and verifiable facts; the values originally attached to works of the imagination have been preserved by transferring them to works of erudition from which imaginative intervention is—at least theoretically—banned. Though Mérimée was the only major writer of fiction in his time to abandon his art because he was unable to reconcile it with the demands of a mistrustful intelligence satisfied only by facts, his dilemma is typical for artists of the post-Romantic generation in France. Weary of flights of fantasy, keenly aware of the fast-growing prestige of science and history, they came to regard the imagination as something arbitrary and insubstantial, and to feel that art, if it was to survive, had somehow to provide itself with the same type of justification as the intellectual activities that appeared to apply themselves exclusively to what was materially ascertainable. Mérimée's inveterate scepticism made him one of the first to experience this problem, and his solution of it was unusually drastic. But from the same instinct spring Flaubert's respect for detail and documentation, the Goncourts' insistence that the novel was only another form of history, Zola's desire to compete with science on its own ground, Huysmans' persistent belief that a novel was valueless unless it constituted a document. Even the obsessive preoccupation with physical description in Parnassian poetry is another manifestation of the same trend. Art is uneasily felt to be gratuitous unless it can be directly related to observed reality, and imagination is viewed with a mixture of mistrust, incomprehension and guilt. In many cases, the conflict is a highly profitable one, in that it gives rise to a new and durable form of art, and in the case of Mérimée himself, though in the end it inhibits his creative processes, it helps to lend his fictional works that air of sobriety and immediacy which is one of their most vital qualities. Moreover, it made him into an extremely competent historian, whose works, though remote from the mainstream of French historical writing, remain models of conscientious investigation, as well as being far more readable today than the often rhetorical and eccentric divagations of certain of his contemporaries. No one better than Mérimée illustrates the degree of truth inherent in the apparently wild statement of another historian of the period—Michelet, who asked in 1861: 'How is it that (with so few exceptions) art is dead?', only to answer: 'History has killed it.'

Notes

¹ In the 1820's Mérimée was an active liberal, and his opposition to the authoritarian and clerical régime of Charles X is shown by his choosing as subjects a peasants' revolt against the feudal aristocracy and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. Once he had become a civil servant under the July Monarchy, his radicalism abated rapidly, and the 1848 Revolution completed his conversion to conservatism. His friendship with the Empress led to his nomination as a senator in 1853, and though he was never a very effective politician, he remained to the end a loyal supporter of the Second Empire, less from Bonapartist convictions than from an instinctive dread of popular uprisings.