Excerpt from Colomba and Carmen: Translated From the French of Prosper Mérimée Only, though we are automates autant qu'esprit, as Pascal tells us, it is useless to expect that what is auto matic in us should remain invariable and unconditioned. If life could be lived on a plan, and for such men on such a plan, if first impulses and profound passions could be kept entirely out of one's own experience, and studied only at a safe distance, then, no doubt, one could go on being happy, in a not too heroic way. But, with Merimee as with all the rest of the world, the scheme breaks down one day, just when a reasonable solution to things seems to have been arrived at. Meri mee had already entered on a peaceable enough liaison when the first letter came to him from the Incomme to whom he was to write so many letters, for nine years without seeing her, and then for thirty years more after he had met her, the last letter being written but two hours before his death. These letters, which we can now read in two volumes, have a delicately insincere sincerity which makes every letter a work. Of art, not because he tried to make it so, but because he could not help seeing the form simultaneously with the feel ing, and writing genuine love-letters with an excellence almost as impersonal as that of his stories. He begins with curiosity, which passes with singular rapidity into a kind of self-willed passion; already in the eighth let ter, long before he has seen her, he is speculating which of the two will know best how to torture the other. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.