Novelist, archaeologist, essayist, and in all three departments one of the greatest masters of French style of his century, Prosper Merimee was born in Paris on September 23, 1803.  The son of a painter, Merimee was intended for the law, but at the age of twenty-two achieved fame as the author of a number of plays purporting to be translations from the Spanish.  From that time until his death at Cannes on September 23, 1870, a brilliant series of plays, essays, novels, and historical and archaeological works poured from his fertile pen.  Altogether he wrote about a score of tales, and it is on these and on his “Letters to an Unknown” that Merimee’s fame depends.  His first story to win universal recognition was “Colombo,” in 1830.  Seventeen years later appeared his “Carmen, the Power of Love,” of which Taine, in his celebrated essay on the work, says, “Many dissertations on our primitive savage methods, many knowing treatises like Schopenhauer’s on the metaphysics of love and death, cannot compare to the hundred pages of ‘Carmen.’”

I.—­I Meet Don Jose

One day, wandering in the higher part of the plain of Cachena, near Cordova, harassed with fatigue, dying of thirst, burned by an overhead sun, I perceived, at some distance from the path I was following, a little green lawn dotted with rushes and reeds.  It proclaimed to me the neighbourhood of a spring, and I saw that a brook issued from a narrow gorge between two lofty spurs of the Sierra de Cabra.

At the mouth of the gorge my horse neighed, and another horse that I did not see answered immediately.  A hundred steps farther, and the gorge, suddenly widening, revealed a sort of natural circus, shaded by the cliffs which surrounded it.  It was impossible to light upon a place which promised a pleasanter halt to the traveller.

But the honour of discovering this beautiful spot did not belong to me.  A man was resting there already, and it my entrance, he had risen and approached his horse.  He was a young fellow of medium height, but robust appearance, with a gloomy and haughty air.  In one hand he held his horse’s halter, in the other a brass blunderbuss.  The fierce air of the man somewhat surprised me, but not having seen any robbers I no longer believed in them.  My guide Antonio, however, who came up behind me, showed evident signs of terror, and drew near very much against his will.

I stretched myself on the grass, drew out my cigar-case, and asked the man with the blunderbuss if he had a tinder-box on him.  The unknown, without speaking, produced his tinder-box, and hastened to strike a light for me.  In return I gave him one of my best Havanas, for which he thanked me with an inclination of the head.

In Spain a cigar given and received establishes relations of hospitality, like the sharing of bread and salt in the East.  My unknown now proved more talkative than I had expected.  He seemed half famished, and devoured some slices of excellent ham, which I had put in my guide’s knapsack, wolfishly.  When I mentioned I was going to the Venta del Cuervo for the night he offered to accompany me, and I accepted willingly.