perhaps in need of patience, that you are dealing with a composition,
the full secret of which is only to be attained in the last
paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will retrace your
steps, more than once (it may be) noting then the minuter structure,
also the natural or wrought flowers by the way. Nowhere is such
method better illustrated than by another of Merimee's quintessential
pieces, Arsene Guillotand here for once with a conclusion ethically
acceptable also. Merimee loved surprises in human nature, but it is
not often that he surprises us by tenderness or generosity of
character, as another master of French fiction, M. Octave Feuillet,
is apt to do; and the simple pathos of Arsene Guillot gives it a
unique place in Merimee's writings. It may be said, indeed, that
only an essentially pitiful nature could have told the exquisitely
cruel story of Matteo Falcone precisely as Merimee has told it; and
those who knew him testify abundantly to his own capacity for
generous friendship. He was no more wanting than others in those
natural sympathies (sending tears to the eyes at the sight of
suffering age or childhood) which happily are no extraordinary
component in men's natures. It was, perhaps, no fitting return for a
[34] friendship of over thirty years to publish posthumously those
Lettres a une Inconnue, which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-
centred nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at the
disposition of another. For just there lies the interest, the
psychological interest, of those letters. An amateur of power, of
the spectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without
sensibility on his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the
mainspring of his method, both of thought and expression, you find
him here taken by surprise at last, and somewhat humbled, by an
unsuspected force of affection in himself. His correspondent,
unknown but for these letters except just by name, figures in them