Carmen, a Gypsy Geography

CHAPTER ONE Inventing Carmen: Prosper Mérimée and the Gypsy Presence in Western Europe

[10] Carmen, a Gypsy Geography ration (1814–1830), July Monarchy (1830–1848), Second Republic (1848–1852) and Second Empire (1852–1870). I consider Mérimée’s literary development of the Gypsy between 1830, when he first learns of her story, and 1845 when he publishes Carmen, la novella.6 Prosper Mérimée Archeologist, philologist, traveler, art critic, historian, and writer of eighteen novels, Prosper Mérimée was born at Broglie on 18 September 1803 to JeanFran çois Léonor Mérimée and Anne-Louise Moreau.7 A man of regal demeanour and Jeffersonian stature, Mérimée inherited his family’s travel-lust. His maternal great-grandmother, Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), was a prolific writer who fled an unhappy marriage. The author of more than seventy volumes of children’s stories, her many journeys, like those of her great-grandson’s, would inform much of her writing.8 Mérimée’s paternal grandfather, of Norman lineage, was a wealthy lawyer and a steward to the Maréchal de Broglie. His father, Léonor Mérimée (1757–1836), “a man of the world and a respected artist,”9 was a painter of “competent mediocrity,” as well as an art historian and a permanent secretary of the École des Beaux Arts.10 Léonor spent his life tracking down technical methods of pre-modern painting, a precursor to his son’s expeditions. Having sent Prosper to the Lycée Napoleon, Mérimée père pushed his son to study law at the University of Paris. A boulevardier, Mérimée instead frequented Parisian literary salons, where he met Henry Beyle (Stendhal), the two becoming lifelong friends.11 Mérimée fils was not interested in law but rather in writing, becoming one of France’s finest writers of short story fiction in the early to mid-nineteenth century.12 His gift as a short story writer was his descriptive ability, his economy of language, and his psychological interest in narration. Oftentimes, he placed himself as narrator in oddly self-reflexive ways inside his text, realizing a relationship between fictional characters and self heretofore unknown. Early in his career, he wrote under a woman’s pseudonym, Clara Gazul, a Spanish actress whom the author had invented. Mérimée also began publishing articles on Spanish theater as early as 1825 (he was then only twenty-two years of age) in Le Globe. The core of his early attempts at short story prose was published in Parisian journals and as a collection of early writings in 1833 in a book entitled Mosaïque. Mérimée was a confirmed bachelor. He never married but was known, like Inventing Carmen [11] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a confidant and friend to numerous wealthy, political, and highly educated Salon women. His love affairs were numerous and helped to enhance his popularity in Parisian consciousness. Among his lovers were the author George Sand (1804–1876), the lyric actress Josephine Céline Cayot, and his real love, Valentine Delessert (1806–1894), who was the wife of the Paris Préfet de Police.13 He also boasted friendships with Sir Anthony Panizzi (1797–1879), Director of the British Museum; the painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863); the Romantic writers Victor Hugo (1802–1885) and Charles Nodier (1780–1844); Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), the architect and champion of French neo-Gothicism; the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), who taught him about Russian literature; and his most famous friendship, Empress Eugénie (1826–1920), wife of Napoleon III (1808–1873). Through his close, lifelong ties to the Empress and her mother, as well as his own work in government, Mérimée became a cherished and influential member of the Emperor’s inner circle. The research for his books came from his work in government. Mérimée entered public service in 1834 and rose to the position of Inspector General of Historic Monuments and Antiquities, a post he held until 1853. Like his great-grandmother, he was consumed by a love of foreign languages and places, traveling extensively through France, southern Europe (especially Spain) and the Near East in the 1830s and 1840s. He investigated and classified ancient Roman architectural ruins , acquiring classical knowledge that he transformed into both historical and mythic settings in his stories.14 In May of 1831, Mérimée was named...