what art of that kind can come to, read Merimee's little romances;
best of all, perhaps, La Venus d'Ille and Arsene Guillot. The former
is a modern version of the beautiful old story of the Ring given to
Venus, given to her, in [32] this case, by a somewhat sordid creature
of the nineteenth century, whom she looks on with more than disdain.
The strange outline of the Canigou, one of the most imposing outlying
heights of the Pyrenees, down the mysterious slopes of which the
traveller has made his way towards nightfall into the great plain of
Toulouse, forms an impressive background, congruous with the many
relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but in entire contrast to
the bourgeois comfort of the place where his journey is to end, the
abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the
celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the midst of this well-
being, prosaic in spite of the neighbourhood, in spite of the pretty
old wedding customs, morsels of that local colour in which Merimee
delights, the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal themselves once
more (malignantly, of course), in the person of a magnificent bronze
statue of Venus recently unearthed in the antiquary's garden. On her
finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom on the morning of
his marriage places for a moment the bridal ring only too effectually
(the bronze hand closes, like a wilful living one, upon it), and
dies, you are to understand, in her angry metallic embraces on his
marriage night. From the first, indeed, she had seemed bent on
crushing out men's degenerate bodies and souls, though the
supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible by a
certain vagueness in the [33] events, which covers a quite natural
account of the bridegroom's mysterious death.

The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed as
Merimee's depends in part on the sense as you read, hastily perhaps,