The French author Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) was a prose writer of the romantic period in France, important for his short stories, which mark the transition from romanticism toward the more objective works of the second half of the century.

Prosper Mérimée, a Parisian born and bred, grew up with the other French romantics. Although he shared some of their traits--a love of the exotic and the violent, for instance--his skeptical, pessimistic temperament kept him from their emotional excesses. He hid his emotional sensitivity beneath a cover of ironic objectivity. As restraint and ironic objectivity were among the principal goals of the later French realists, he stands as their pre-cursor.

Mérimée's initial writings were entertaining frauds, published as alleged translations. A more important work under his own name, Chronique du règne de Charles IX, brought...