Prosper Mérimée

Adolphe Thiers publishes the first two volumes of his celebrated Histoire de la Révolution française in 1823. which founds his literary reputation and boosts his political career.

Having trained for the law, the twenty-four-year-old Thiers had moved to Paris two years earlier with just a hundred francs in his pocket.

Thanks to his letters of recommendation, he had been able to get a position as a secretary to the prominent philanthropist and social reformer, the Duke of La Rochefoucalt-Liancourt; the man who in 1789, when King Louis XVI, asked if there was a revolt in Paris, replied, "No, Majesty, this is a Revolution."

He stayed only three months with the Duke, whose political views were more conservative than his own, and with whom he could see no rapid avenue for advancement.

He was then introduced to Charles-Guillaume Étienne, the editor of the Le Constitutionnel, the most influential political and literary journal in Paris.

The newspaper is the leading opposition journal against the royalist government; it has forty-four thousand subscribers, compared with just twelve thousand eight hundred subscribers for the royalist, or legitimist, press.

He had offered Etienne an essay on the political figure François Guizot, Thiers' future rival, which was original, polemical and aggressive, and caused a stir in Paris literary and political circles.

Etienne commissioned Thiers as a regular contributor.

At the same time that Thiers began writing, his friend from the law school in Aix, Mignet, had been hired as a writer for another leading opposition journal, the Courier Français, then worked for a major Paris book publisher.

Within four months of his arrival in Paris, Thiers was one of the most read-journalists in the city.

He writes about politics, art, literature, and history.

His literary reputation introduces him into the most influential literary and political salons in Paris.

He meets Stendhal, the Prussian geographer Alexander Von Humboldt, the famed banker Jacques Laffitte, the author and historian Prosper Mérimée, the painter François Gérard; he is the first journalist to write a glowing review for a young new painter, Eugene Delacroix.

When a revolution breaks out in Spain in 1822, he travels as far as the Pyrenees to write about it.

He soon collects and published a volume of his articles, the first on the salon of 1822, the second on his trip to the Pyrenees.

He is very well paid by Johann Friedrich Cotta, the part-proprietor of the Constitutionnel.

Most important for his future career, he has been introduced to Talleyrand, the former foreign minister of Napoleon, who has become his political guide and mentor.

Under the tutelage of Talleyrand, Thiers becomes an active member of the circle of opponents of the Bourbon regime, which include the financier Lafitte and the Marquis de Lafayette.

Prosper Merimee, a French archaeologist and inspector-general of historic monuments, makes love and death the central themes of a collection of ironic dramas, The Plays of Clara Gazul, in 1825, mischievously attributing the works to an imaginary Spanish actress.

Prosper Mérimée, produces his chronicle play, La Jacquerie, about the famous French peasant insurrection during the Hundred Years’ War, in 1828.

A twenty-five-year-old Paris-born dramatist and short story writer inspired by the historical fiction popularized by Sir Walter Scott, Mérimée has studied law as well as Greek, Spanish, English, and Russian.

He had destroyed the manuscript of his first play, the unpublished Cromwell, written in 1822, feeling its similarities with contemporary French politics were too obvious.

Mérimée has also written two hoaxes: Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul (1825), supposedly a translation by one Joseph L'Estrange of work written by a Spanish actress; and La Guzla (1827), ballads about various mystical themes purportedly translated from the original "Illyrian" (i.e., Serbo-Croatian) by one Hyacinthe Maglanowich.

These ballads are to have considerable influence, later translated into Russian, notably by Pushkin and Lermontov.

Prosper Mérimée follows La Jacquerie with another richly detailed historical novel, “A Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX,” in 1829.

The same year, Mérimée combines folktale material with formal artistry to produces his landmark short story “Mateo Falcone.”

Nôtre-Dame, the great Gothic cathedral of Paris, is at once a setting and a protagonist in Victor Hugo's Nôtre-Dame de Paris.

Hugo had intended his book to awaken a concern for the surviving Gothic architecture, however, rather than to initiate a craze for neo-Gothic in contemporary life.

In the same year this hugely popular work of fiction appears, the new French monarchy establishes a post of Inspector-General of Ancient Monuments, a post that will be filled in 1833 by Prosper Merimée.

Honoré de Balzac, like Prosper Mérimée, combines folktale material with formal artistic technique in A Passion in the Desert, published in 1830.

Prosper Mérimée writes La Vénus d'Ille, a fantastic horror tale of a bronze statue that seemingly comes to life, in 1837.

In 18324, he had written Les âmes du Purgatoire, a novella about the libertine Don Juan Maraña.

Mérimée loves mysticism, history, and the unusual, and may have been influenced by Charles Nodier (though he does not appreciate his works), and the cruelty and psychological drama of Aleksandr Pushkin.

Many of his stories are mysteries set in foreign places, Spain and Russia being popular sources of inspiration.

In 1834, Mérimée had been appointed to the post of inspector-general of historical monuments.

He is a born archaeologist, combining linguistic faculty of a very unusual kind with accurate scholarship, with remarkable historical appreciation, and with a sincere love for the arts of design and construction, in the former of which he has some practical skill.

In his official capacity, he publishes numerous reports, some of which, with other similar pieces, have been republished in his works.

Works of this period include La Chronique du temps de Charles IX (1829), a novel set at the French court at the time of the St. Bartholomew massacre, and "Mateo Falcone" (1829)—a short story about a Corsican man who kills his son in the name of justice (made into an opera of the same name by the Russian composer César Cui).

In 1833, he had published Mosaïque, a collection of short stories, containing: "Mateo Falcone", "Vision de Charles XI", "L'enlèvement de la redoute", "Tamango, "Le fusil enchanté", "Federigo", "Ballades", "La partie de trictrac", "Le vase étrusque", "Les mécontens".

It also includes three of his letters from Spain.

Most of these tales were previously published in the Revue de Paris in 1829 and 1830.

Prosper Mérimée, in Spain in 1830, had met and befriended the Countess of Montijo, whom he will later credit as being his source for the Carmen story, which he pens in 1845.

France's new emperor, hitherto a bachelor, had begun quickly to look for a wife to produce a legitimate heir-apparent.

Most of the royal families of Europe are unwilling to marry into the parvenu Bonaparte family, and after rebuffs from Princess Carola of Sweden and from Queen Victoria's German niece Princess Adelheid of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Napoleon had decided to lower his sights somewhat and "marry for love", choosing the Countess of Teba, Eugénie de Montijo, a Spanish noblewoman of partial Scottish ancestry who had been brought up in Paris.

Prosper Mérimée, together with his friend the Countess of Montijo, has coached her daughter, Eugenie, during the courtship with Napoleon III (though his correspondence indicates he was opposed to their marriage).

When the daughter becomes the Empress Eugénie of France in 1853, he is made a senator.