Historical Novelist
[In the following essay, Raitt studies the technique of Mérimeé's Chronique du règne de Charles IX and evaluates his work as a historical novelist.]
. . . remarquons seulement à quelles absurdes et dégoûtantes exagérations s'abaissent les hommes dans leurs querelles religieuses.
'Les Mormons', Études anglo-américaines
La Jaquerie (the usual spelling is Jacquerie, but Mérimée's version is an uncommon alternative rather than a mistake by Balzac's type-setter) has not found much favour with critics. Even the author's friends were lukewarm: Stendhal regarded it as a falling-off from Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul, and Mary Shelley complained that 'we feel the want of one prominent character to concentrate the interest'.1 Lack of plot and unity, dispersal of interest, characters who are little better than types, excess of melodramatic devices, crudeness and confusion of local colour, inaccuracy of historical background—these are but a few of the reproaches heaped on a work which has only rarely been reprinted since 1828. Yet when one reads it nowadays, it is strangely fresh in its appeal; that it has shortcomings is undeniable, but taken for what it is, it is more successful than some of Mérimée's detractors—and even some of his supporters—are inclined to allow.
La Jaquerie bears the subtitle Scènes féodales (Feudal Scenes) and this indicates the way in which he proposed to handle his investigation of the fourteenth-century peasants' revolt in Northern France. Following on the vogue for Scott's novels, for Shakespeare's chronicle plays, for the picturesque evocation of the past by historians like Barante, Mérimée's aim was to make a violent and critical period of French history come alive in the mind's eye of his readers—since there was never any question of staging this sequence of thirty-six separate scenes, with its immense cast, its surging battles, its decapitations and mutilations, and its broad sweep over time and space. Encouraged by the example of Vitet and of Dittmer and Cavé (the authors of the popular Soires de Neuilly), he wanted to use dialogue form not so much for specifically dramatic purposes as to give a greater sense of immediacy to the unfolding of a historical perspective. This is why he declines to allow a single figure or group of figures to dominate his pictures; sometimes we follow the fortunes of Frère Jean, the plebeian monk who agrees to lead the revolt when he fails to gain election as abbot of his monastery, sometimes we are more concerned with the unfortunate Pierre, educated above his station and languishing with unrequited love for the lady of the castle, sometimes we even find ourselves sympathising with d'Apremont, the local lord who, cruel and unfeeling though he may be towards his serfs, nevertheless displays in adversity a stoical courage and a respect for the laws of chivalry which are far from despicable. If any one of these characters were visibly to become the hero, we should see these scenes as a play, whereas they are meant as an imaginative re-creation of history.
For the same reason, Mérimée evolves a technique of character formation which was to stand him in good stead in the Chronique du règne de Charles IX and later in Colomba: that of envisaging individual psychology above all as the embodiment of the main features of a given time or country. The active, practical, earthy Frère Jean and the pious, unworldly abbot represent two aspects of the medieval clergy. The brutal, ignorant but courageous d'Apremont, his sadistic son Conrad, his haughty and beautiful daughter Isabelle and her coarse fiancé Montreuil stand for the nobility, blinded by prejudice, shackled by rigid rules and customs, scarcely aware that the peasants are human. The peasantry have as their spokesmen the honest Simon, the vengeful Renaud, the cowardly Morand, the drunken Gaillon, pushed beyond endurance by the harsh rapacity of their masters, capable of bravery as well as savagery when they rise in defence of their lives but too stupid and selfish to see where their true interests lie, and eager only to get back to the harvest once their immediate objectives are attained. Then there are those who stand for the disruptive forces outside the feudal system: the so-called Werewolf, the exblacksmith who has taken to the woods with a band of ravening outlaws, Siward and Brown, the English soldiers of fortune, ready to sell their swords to the highest bidder until hostilities between England and France are resumed. It was not Mérimée's intention that these people should emerge as rounded individuals; the function of each is to have sufficient character to distinguish him as a human being while primarily embodying one or other of the forces at work in a particular historical situation. No doubt a Shakespeare or a Scott can achieve both aims simultaneously; Mérimée does not rise to those heights, but he does present a singularly clear and convincing picture of a historical process in motion.
As for the interpretation of history itself, Mérimée was, for his time, reasonably well documented on what remains an obscure episode. He had read Froissart, Buchon's Chroniques, Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye's Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie and other historians,2 and though he undertook no research of his own he could justifiably feel that his knowledge of the subject was a thorough one. It is however true that in the Jaquerie he made no effort to keep strictly to known historical fact: all the characters and most of the places mentioned are fictitious, and there is no reference to such important figures as Guillaume Karle, the main leader of the Jacques, or É tienne Marcel, who at first fostered their rebellion as a means of increasing his own power. With the information in his possession, Mérimée could undoubtedly have been more accurate, in terms of facts, than he was; but instead he chose invention. The reason for this deviation probably lies in the compromise which historical fiction always forces on its practitioners. The following year, in the Chronique, Mérimée was to show himself well aware of the dangers of centring a historical romance on well-known characters, rightly preferring the freedom of invented figures and sniping mercilessly at Vigny for having adopted a different system in Cinq-Mars. In La Jaquerie, he consequently deals exclusively with people who, because he can mould them to his will, more clearly exemplify what he regarded as the outstanding traits of the whole revolt. The verisimilitude of the general colouring takes precedence over particular detail, and in that respect, Mérimée's understanding of what the Jacquerie involved seems lucid and convincing.
In choosing that moment of French history, he was of course once again demonstrating his radicalism. Under the reactionary monarchy of Charles X, to give a sympathetic analysis of the uprising of the lower classes against the oppression of the clergy and the nobility was the act of a militant liberal. Mérimée's picture of the savagery, the ignorance, the lawlessness, the corruption of the Middle Ages stands in deliberate and violent contrast to the idealised image of medieval piety, courtliness and feudal virtue propagated by Chateaubriand and the devotees of the 'troubadour style'; he declares uncompromisingly in his preface: 'I have tried to give an impression of the horrifying mores of the fourteenth century, and I believe that I have lightened rather than darkened the colours of my picture.'3 Never one to allow illusions to subsist unchallenged (especially when they ran counter to his own opinions), Mérimée takes a positive pleasure in emphasising the greed of the clergy, the cruelty of the nobles, the poltroonery of the middle classes. Yet he has too sombre a view of human nature to allow his work to degenerate into a propaganda exercise on behalf of the victims of tyranny. The peasants may have a just cause, but their behaviour is ferocious, inconsistent, cowardly, undisciplined, naïve and confused; it is inevitable that they should in the end be betrayed, outwitted and defeated. When the English soldier Brown exclaims with disgust: 'That's what all these Frenchmen are like. They're always complaining and they never have the courage to set themselves free',4 one may well hear Mérimée speaking directly to his fellow-countrymen in 1828; but when one sees the eventual fate of the revolt, one realises that Mérimée had too little faith in the quality of the masses to believe that revolution could lead to anything but chaos and suffering.
La Jaquerie is no masterpiece, but like everything Mérimée wrote, it is remarkably readable, and it contains a salutary dose of realism about a period which his contemporaries were all too liable to idealise. Moreover, it combines two qualities not often found conjoined. On the one hand, by its concentration on details, short scenes, intimate events, numerous characters, it brings the reader into immediate contact with the life of the Middle Ages in its most concrete form: its directness makes us relive the tragic adventures of the revolt as if we had been there. On the other hand, its discreet use of types imperceptibly makes us aware of what social and other forces lay behind the rebellion of 1358, and at the same time presents us with a characteristically grim and unadorned vision of humanity. It has the strong, harsh flavour of much of Mérimée's most effective writing, and it deserves a more honourable place than it is usually given.
If La Jaquerie is often underrated, there is little danger of the same happening to the Chronique du règne de Charles IX. It has always been one of Mérimée's most popular works; translated into German within months of its publication,5 more than once used as an opera libretto,6 it ran through several editions during its author's lifetime and has never been out of print since—it has even survived being prescribed for generations as a school text. Critics are not entirely of one mind about its merits (they rarely are with anything Mérimée wrote); one would see it as his masterpiece,7 another as the greatest French historical novel of the Romantic period,8 while some are displeased by its structure, its style or its attitudes.9 But few would be prepared to dismiss it as negligible, and hardly anyone could fail to derive pleasure from reading it.
In conception, it springs from the same area of interest as La Jaquerie: the imaginative recreation of history in the wake of Sir Walter Scott. But the semi-dramatic form of the earlier work is now abandoned in favour of full-scale narrative fiction. Superficially this might betoken a movement nearer to the pattern of the Waverley Novels; in fact, Mérimée, who was already beginning to look askance at the Scottish author's talent, only adopts what appeals to him and ostentatiously rejects the rest. Like Scott he bases his story on solid and minutely documented historical fact; like Scott, he is careful to assign only subsidiary roles to well-known historical figures; like Scott, he aims to give a vivid and convincing picture of the inner and outer life of a distant period; like Scott, he makes his dialogue as rich, as varied and as realistic as he can. The resemblance stops there, and Mérimée takes care that we should notice where he differs. In an interpolated Dialogue between the Reader and the Author, he makes fun of the over-elaborate portraits and interminable descriptions in which Scott and some of his imitators indulge, and suggests that anyone who wants to know what Charles IX looked like should go and inspect his bust in the Angoulême Museum. He avoids philosophising and moralising, which is all the more notable a feat as the subject would have lent itself to the sort of discursive generalisation to which Scott is prone. And there is no need to point out that his view of passion is much earthier than Scott's. Above all, the speed of his narration is far greater than the sedate progress of Scott's massive volumes. The result is that the Chronique is as picturesque and evocative as anything Scott wrote, but with the additional virtues of a more realistic picture of humanity, a more impartial attitude, and a much increased liveliness of tone and pace.
That Mérimée should have chosen to build his novel around the Massacre of St Bartholomew's Day in 1572 is entirely typical. In the first place, it was a favourite topic for liberal and anti-Catholic authors under the rule of Charles X, and though Mérimée successfully resisted the temptation to make a propaganda piece out of it, his work is clearly intended to remind his contemporaries of the dangers of fanaticism and religious persecution (one of the most controversial pieces of legislation enacted under Charles X provided that anyone guilty of sacrilege might have his hand cut off). Moreover the Chronique follows La Jaquerie in examining, with fascinated horror, the peculiar savagery inherent in civil war. Already Mérimée seems to have had premonitions of that dread of violent strife within France which, after 1848, was to make him such a staunch upholder of the Second Empire as the only bulwark against chaos. Nothing is more effective in the Chronique than the grisly account of the mass slaughter of 24 August 1572, its hideous aftermath, and the subsequent resumption of the Wars of Religion, and Mérimée is undoubtedly, if reticently, moved by this appalling spectacle.
Most of all, his choice of subject is symptomatic of a growing preoccupation with the sixteenth century as a time when men were less afraid to be themselves than in the modern era. This preoccupation was fostered by his friendship with Stendhal, who regarded the Renaissance, especially in Italy, as one of the most attractive periods in history. According to Stendhal, passions ran high, and crime was consequently rife; but men were filled with a vigour and a confidence which produced greatness and which have sadly atrophied under the pressure of conformist civilisation. Mérimée was much less sure of his ground. Allured by the frankness and the vitality of the sixteenth-century mind, he was disturbed by the violence which accompanied it, and constantly debated with himself—as no doubt with Stendhal—the question of whether it would or would not have been preferable to live three centuries earlier. The issue is raised, rather tentatively, in the preface: 'I find it intriguing to compare this way of life with our own and to note that in the latter vigorous passions have decayed, to the advantage of peace and quiet, and perhaps of happiness.'10 In a later article on Henri de Guise, he is somewhat more affirmative: 'I am on the whole inclined to think that the sum total of vice and virtue has always been the same; consequently I do not believe we are any better than our forefathers, though we murder less. Murder was one form of their passions; their passions are still ours, but they have different forms; but I think we must congratulate ourselves on living in a time when these forms have become appreciably less harsh.'11 This same point recurs in his 1858 edition of Brantôme, one of his main sources for the Chronique:' We are not among those who think our ancestors were much better than we are; nor do we think that we are greatly superior to them in morality.'12 These hesitations in the end redound to his advantage as a chronicler of the sixteenth century: he feels an instinctive sympathy with the men and manners of that period which enables him to write about them with insight and conviction, but at the same time he remains sufficiently detached to present them coolly and in perspective.
His knowledge of the times is extensive. In the preface, he indicates the part played by reading in the genesis of his novel:
I had just been reading a considerable number of memoirs and pamphlets relating to the end of the sixteenth century. I decided to produce an extract from my reading, and here it is.13
His own footnotes and the researches of scholars confirm the thoroughness of his investigations. Among his main sources were the works of Brantôme and of Agrippa d'Aubigné (both of whom he read with great relish and of whom he was later to produce enthusiastic studies), as well as Pierre de l'Estoile's Journals, and other authors he consulted were Montluc, Tavannes, La Noue, de Thou and Arcère. Most of these were contemporary accounts—Mérimée always preferred to turn to first-hand sources of historical scenes, and the effect is to put the reader squarely among the characters he evokes. As in La Jaquerie,he achieves an immediacy of impact which is most effective, as well as being highly praiseworthy in its fidelity to the general lineaments of the epoch. Though Mérimée was not yet a professional historian, the qualities of precision, vividness and penetration revealed by the Chronique demonstrate that he was already well on the way to possessing the method and equipment of a specialist. The historical side of the Chronique is undeniably far superior to that of the novels of Vigny, Hugo or Dumas—not until Flaubert wrote Salammbô is there another novelist who takes his duties as a historian so seriously.
This is not to say that his account is above reproach. In the preface, he argues ingeniously (though his case has not convinced modern historians) that the massacre of the Huguenots was the unforeseen result of a variety of chance circumstances, with the Duc de Guise inciting fanaticism in order to secure his own precarious position. In the novel itself, however, it appears that the massacre was premeditated by the king himself. Why there should be this discrepancy between novel and preface is unclear; probably the story was written first with the traditional explanation in mind, and the alternative interpretation only occurred to Mérimée when he was summing up his ideas. There is also one notable anachronism: the emphasis placed on duelling among the raffinés, the young bloods of the period. In reality, the raffinés and the vogue for duelling belong to the reign of Louis XIII in the next century. Mérimée was confused by his reliance on d'Aubigné, who talks about both periods. Most damaging, however, is Mérimée's inability to evaluate the religious feeling of the time. Himself remote from religious belief, he fails to convey anything of the inner motives or experiences of those with strong faith. To him, convinced Protestants and Catholics alike are potential fanatics, and he can identify himself only with George de Mergy, the elder of the two brothers around whom the novel is built and who has been aptly described as 'a Voltairean in the wrong century'.14
George's attitudes are certainly Mérimée's. In the following conversation, George, who has nominally become a Catholic, explains to his brother Bernard why he cares nothing for either religion.
'Papists! Huguenots! It's just superstition either way. I cannot believe what my reason tells me is absurd. Our litanies and your psalms are equally worthless nonsense. The only thing is,' he added with a smile, 'that there is sometimes good music in our churches, whereas in yours it's torture for sensitive ears.'
'That's a fine advantage for your religion—just the sort of thing to convert people to it!'
'Don't call it my religion; I don't believe in it any more than yours. Ever since I could think for myself, ever since I could call my reason my own . . .'
'But . . .'
'Ah, that's enough preaching. I knew by heart all you could say to me. I too have had my hopes and fears. Do you think that I haven't made strenuous efforts to preserve the happy superstitions of my childhood? I have read all our sages to try to find in their works some consolation for the doubts that terrify me, but all I did was increase them. In a word, I couldn't believe and I still can't. Belief is a precious gift which has been withheld from me, but I would never dream of trying to deprive others of it.'15
This resigned scepticism is Mérimée's last word on the subject. Acutely alive all his life to the perils of fanaticism, Mérimée was profoundly mistrustful of those who confidently asserted that they alone possessed the truth in religious matters; in 1859, he still felt as he had in 1829. 'In practical terms, I consider that doubt has fewer drawbacks than belief. There is nothing more terrible than a man who is sure of himself, when he goes in for reasoning and starts from a false premise.'16
Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Mérimée showed more sympathy for the persecuted than the persecutors. Not only were the Catholics the perpetrators of the massacre, they were also the most powerful and hence to him the most dangerous religious group in his own day. Moreover, Mérimée was friendly with many Protestants—Stapfer, the Lagdens, Cuvier, the Delesserts among others—and eventually died as a Protestant (though it would be exaggerated to speak of a conversion). So in the Chronique the Catholic party appears as the more fanatical, the more ferocious, the more unscrupulous, and events are seen almost exclusively from the Protestant side. But Mérimée nevertheless makes it clear that, given the opportunity, the Protestants would be just as intolerant as their opponents. In the last scenes of the novel, a Catholic monk and a Protestant minister fight over the dying body of George de Mergy, who rejects them both. Ultimately, the enemy for Mérimée is not Catholicism, but fanaticism, whatever the flag it flies.
But these overtones scarcely obtrude themselves in the book. What concerns Mérimée is the depiction of human behaviour. He defines his own interests with admirable clarity in the preface.
In history, I only like anecdotes, and among anecdotes I prefer those where I think I can find a faithful portrayal of manners and characters in a given period. It is not a very noble taste; but I admit, to my shame, that I would willingly exchange Thucydides for the authentic memoirs of Aspasia or a slave of Pericles; for memoirs, which are intimate conversations between author and reader, alone provide those portraits of man which entertain and interest me.17
This conception of history (which continued to inform his historical works throughout his life) leads him to construct his novel around a series of characters and incidents designed to throw into relief the most picturesque and typical features of life in the 1570s. Both plot and psychology are very much subservient to this intention. None of the characters is very complex: Bernard is the naïve young man learning wisdom in a hard school, George is the unhappy apostate who would prefer not to have to commit himself to either side, Diane de Turgis (who owes much to Mme Lacoste) is the beautiful seductress who combines piety and sensuality in equal measure. The others, whether real or invented—Hornstein, Comminges, Coligny, Charles IX, Béville, Vaudreuil, La Noue—are no more than vigorously drawn sketches. Nor is the plot very prominent. Simple in outline and episodic in nature, its function is to provide a pretext for a series of brilliant tableaux de genre, not all of which are even strictly necessary. The incident at the inn, when Bernard loses his horse and his money to the thieving German mercenaries, has little relevance to the main action, but it enables Mérimée to give a vivid and exciting depiction of the retires who were such an important adjunct to the Protestant forces, and similar reasons govern the inclusion of set-pieces like Frère Lubin's rollicking sermon or Bernard's duel with Comminges. With consummate skill, Mérimée has arranged his plot in such a way that the reader is carried from one such scene to another, led on by the interest which he is made to take in the principal figures but which is never allowed to obscure the fact that the novel really exists to display the backcloth against which the action is played out.
There are of course disadvantages in this system. The novel does give the impression of a piece of intricate mosaic work rather than an integrated whole; it has no clear centre; the main characters do not always marry happily with the background. But as with La Jaquerie,these shortcomings seem insignificant when one realises the true purpose of the work as an imaginative evocation of the past. Seen in that light, Mérimée's unobtrusive choice of the significant detail culled from contemporary sources is nothing short of masterly. Whether in scenes, in costume, in vocabulary, in habits or in attitudes, he shows a remarkable gift for selecting the salient trait which remains in the memory and typifies a man or an era, and this confers on his novel a striking vividness and clarity—Coligny's toothpicks, the king's shifting eyes, the woman whose skirts catch on the beams of the bridge as her body is flung into the Seine, the soldier who is roasted to death when his bulky armour wedges him in the window of a burning mill. Mérimée may mock historical novelists who cannot resist the temptation of lengthy portraits and descriptions, but he himself takes care that the reader should be able to visualise with great immediacy all that he needs to make the scene present to him. However, the curt incisiveness with which he does it avoids any sense of gratuitous wordpainting. Here for example is Dietrich Hornstein as he sits carousing in an inn:
Before an oak table, blackened with grease and smoke, was seated the captain of the retires. He was a tall, burly man of about fifty, with an aquiline nose, a fiery complexion, thin greying hair which did not hide a broad scar beginning near his left ear and disappearing beneath his thick moustache. He had taken off his breast plate and helmet, keeping only a doublet of Hungarian leather, darkened by the rubbing of the arms he carried and carefully mended in several places. His sabre and pistols were placed on a bench within easy reach, but he still wore a broad-bladed dagger, a weapon which a wise man only removed when he was going to bed.18
Such lightning sketches are frequent; they are always rapid, picturesque and telling, and they always make the reader feel that he is an eye-witness to the events. This effect is heightened by a style which never draws attention to itself. Stendhal thought Mérimée's way of writing was commonplace; Mérimée thought much the same of Stendhal's. In fact, each of them possesses the cardinal virtue of naturalness, and it is this which makes their French so much more pleasant to read nowadays than the dated rhetoric of those of their contemporaries who were forever striving after grand literary effects. Mérimée was the first to practise the precept he gave years later to an aspiring young author:
You will soon get used to expressing your ideas easily and naturally. Without those two adverbs it is impossible to write French [ . . . ]19 Write everything as you would a letter, and remember that between high style and familiar style the greatest difference is not in the words but in the ideas.20
In the Chronique the free-flowing, urbane style not only keeps things moving with commendable alacrity, but by its coolness, its moderation and its humour allows events to speak for themselves. The massacre is of itself so horrifying, the siege of La Rochelle so dramatic, that Mérimée has no need to heighten tension by stylistic devices, and the matter-of-fact tone of his account leaves the reader to react to facts rather than authorial virtuosity. This is how he relates one of the most poignant climaxes of the book, the shooting of George in an ambush commanded by Bernard de Mergy.
The captain with the red plume turned his head, and Mergy recognised his brother. He stretched out his hand to push aside his neighbour's arquebus; but, before he could reach it, the shot had been fired. The horsemen, surprised by the unexpected volley, dispersed and fled into the countryside; Captain George fell to the ground with two bullets in him. 21
Mérimée sometimes goes further than this to keep the temperature down. Determined not to be visibly moved by what he writes, he injects into it humour, not only in the numerous comic scenes such as Mergy's discomfiture at the inn, Diane's mystification of her suitor, Frère Lubin's grotesque sermon, or the rich episode where two fake monks are made to baptise two chickens 'carp' and 'perch' so that a band of hungry miscreants can have a good feast on a Friday, but also in lightly ironic comments or in interpolated quotations from Molière, Saint-Évremond or Rabelais.22 In two places he even reverts to the deflationary tricks he had employed in Clara Gazul. One is the notorious eighth chapter, in which he blandly interrupts his story to discuss with an imaginary interlocutor the aesthetics of the historical novel; the conversation ends with the reader exclaiming in disgust: 'Ah! I see that in your novel I shall not find what I wanted,' to which the author calmly replies: 'I fear so.'23 The other concludes the novel with the same reference to its fictitious nature that one finds in the Gazul plays: 'Did Mergy get over it? Did Diane take another lover? I leave it to the reader to decide, so that, however he feels, he will be able to make the novel end as he wishes.'24 The flippant tone of the last sentence is intended, as usual, to indicate that, whoever else may be taken in by his fiction, the author certainly is not.
All in all, the Chronique is a considerable achievement which has stood the test of time much better than the other historical novels of the period. It has a fresh and frank air about it which, allied with its vivid directness, makes reading it an invigorating experience. Tht it is carefully built up as a patchwork of details and separate scenes is therefore anything but a disadvantage; we ourselves live through the events of 1572, like contemporaries, seeing the effects rather than the causes, not always able to discern a meaningful pattern in them, swept along by the course of things without time to reflect or moralise but aware that, below the surface, there is much to be learnt from them. The dispassionate manner of narration and the almost constant presence of humour keeps us at arm's length from the narrator, just as it keeps him at arm's length from the frightening reality which he describes: perhaps it was this which led Walter Pater to call the Chronique 'Mérimée's one quite cheerful book'.25 But the cheerfulness is only the barrier which holds passion at bay; the picture of humanity which emerges from the novel is as grim and as disturbing as that which the rest of Mérimée's work gives us. The combination of ironic detachment and powerful emotion is one of the hallmarks of Mérimée's art, and the Chronique represents one of his most successful fusions of these two elements. It would be misleading to place it on the same level as the great masterpieces of the novel in nineteenth-century France—Balzac's Cousine Bette, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir or Flaubert's L'É ducation sentimentale. After all, it is the first attempt at narrative fiction by a young man of twenty-five, and it is not surprising if its psychology is not particularly deep, its construction somewhat loose, and its philosophy of tolerant scepticism of no great originality. It remains nevertheless one of the outstanding successes of its notoriously difficult genre and by its keen observation and telling use of detail it looks forward both to mid-century realism and to Mérimée's own later distinction as a historian.
Notes
1Art. cit.
2 Cf. Trahard, La Jeunesse de Prosper Mérimée, Vol. I, pp. 297-335.
3La Jaquerie, ed. E. Marsan, Paris, Le Divan, 1928,p. 3.
4Ibid., p. 39.
5 Cf. p. 74.
6 Notably for Hérold's Le Pré aux clercs.
7 Maurice Rat, in his introduction to an edition of the Chronique (Paris, Garnier, 1949).
8 Louis Maigron, Le Roman historique à l'époque romantique, Paris, Champion, 1912.
9 E.g. Eugène Marsan, in the preface to his edition of the Chronique (Paris, Le Divan, 1928), and Trahard, La Jeunesse de Prosper Mérimée, Vol. II, pp. 10-62.
10Romans et nouvelles, Vol. I, p. 11.
11Portraits historiques et littéraires, pp. 27-8.
12Ibid., p. 82.
13Romans et nouvelles, Vol. I, p. 11.
14 A. Filon, Mérimée et ses amis, Paris, Hachette, 1894,p. 44.
15Romans et nouvelles, Vol. I, pp. 61-2.
16CG., Vol. IX, p. 271.
17Romans et nouvelles, Vol. I, p. 11.
18Romans et nouvelles, Vol. I, p. 23.
19CG., Vol. V, p. 324.
20Ibid., p. 328.
21Romans et nouvelles, Vol. I, p. 221.
22Ibid, pp. 54, 71, 223, etc.
23Romans et nouvelles, Vol. I, p. 88.
24Ibid., p. 231.
25Studies in Modern European Literature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1900, p. 40.
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History and Fiction in the Works of Mérimée, 1803-1870
Narrator and Supernatural in Mérimée's La Vénus D'Ille