the [28] pity. Saint-Clair, the consent of his mistress barely
attained at last, rushes madly on self-destruction, that he may die
with the taste of his great love fresh on his lips. All the
grotesque accidents of violent death he records with visual
exactness, and no pains to relieve them; the ironic indifference, for
instance, with which, on the scaffold or the battle-field, a man will
seem to grin foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has
passed. Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so
close to the cannon's mouth as in the Taking of the Redoubt, while
Matteo Falcone--twenty-five short pages--is perhaps the cruellest
story in the world.

Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code of action, of
self-respect, a conscience, all to herself, who with all her virginal
charm only does not make you hate her, is, in truth, the type of a
sort of humanity Merimee found it pleasant to dream of--a humanity as
alien as the animals, with whose moral affinities to man his
imaginative work is often directly concerned. Were they so alien,
after all? Were there not survivals of the old wild creatures in the
gentlest, the politest of us? Stories that told of sudden freaks of
gentle, polite natures, straight back, not into Paradise, were always
welcome to men's fancies; and that could only be because they found a
psychologic truth in them. With much success, with a credibility
insured by his literary tact, Merimee tried his own hand at such
stories: unfrocked the [29] bear in the amorous young Lithuanian
noble, the wolf in the revolting peasant of the Middle Age. There
were survivals surely in himself, in that stealthy presentment of his
favourite themes, in his own art. You seem to find your hand on a
serpent, in reading him.