Prosper Mérimée: La Vénus d'Ille

(http://eduscol.education.fr/archives/lettres/textimage/exmedieval.htm)
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Prosper Mérimée wrote this story in 1835. It's definitory, I think, for his entire oeuvre: his passion for the cultural artifacts of Greek-Roman antiquity, even his desire to make their universe alive again, at any cost; his empathy for local folklores, his voluptuousness in pushing the imaginary to become reality;  his courage to find the evil dimension of the ineffable (lesson absorbed from Pushkin?); his balance of the story between rational and irrational; and his superb balance, superb mastership, of the phrase.

Was he a faithful Christian? Far from that. But, instead of faith, doubt: and nihilistic obsession for a mysterious presence of something beyond. Mysterious, capricious, incomprehensible, evil.

You can find the text here:

http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_V%C3%A9nus_d%E2%80%99Ille

(Prosper Mérimée)

Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée
1803-1870
source of the photo: Historical and Public Figures Collection - NY Public Library Archives
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prosper_Merimee_photo.jpg)
no copyright infringement intended

I'm always coming back with great joy to my reading passions of my youth, the French authors of the 19th century. Their building of sentences is perfect, their French is the noblest. It cannot be more than that.

A bit about Prosper Mérimée. He knew Greek, Spanish, English, and Russian (the first who gave French renderings of Russian classics). He was an eminent archaeologist, with a great love for the arts and with a keen interest for mysticism and history. His stories show his passions, and his imagination is superbly impregnated with a particular spin for the unusual and beguilement (and what else is mysticism and history so often other than unusual and beguilement?).

• La Vénus d'Ille

(Le Parnasse des Lettres)