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Prosper Mérimée (28 September 1803 – 23 September 1870) was an important French writer in the school of Romanticism, and one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, and an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian and translated the work of several important Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, and was responsible for the protection of many historic sites, including the medieval citadel of Carcassonne, and the restoration of the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Along with the writer George Sand, he discovered the series of tapestries The Lady and the Unicorn, and arranged for their preservation. He was instrumental in the creation of Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, where the tapestries now are displayed. The official database of French monuments, the Base Mérimée, bears his name.
Prosper Mérimée was born in Paris on September 28, 1803, early in the Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte. His father Léonor was a painter who became professor of design at the École polytechnique, and was engaged in a study of the chemistry of oil paints. In 1807 his father was named of Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture. His mother Anne was twenty-nine when he was born, and was also a painter. His father's sister, Augustine, was the mother of the physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel and the orientalist Fulgence Fresnel. At the age of seven, Prosper was enrolled in the Lycée Napoléon, which after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 became the Lycée Henri-IV. His classmates and friends were the children of the elite of Restoration France, including Adrien Jussieu, son of famous botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, and Jean-Jacques Ampère, son of André-Marie Ampère, famous for his research in physics and electrodynamics. Both his parents spoke English well, traveled frequently to England and entertained many British guests. By the age of fifteen he was fluent in English. He had a talent for foreign languages, and besides English mastered classical Greek and Latin. Later in life he became fluent in Spanish, and could passably speak Serbian and Russian. In school he also had a strong interest in history, and was fascinated by magic and the supernatural, which later became important elements in many of his stories.
He finished the Lycée with high marks in classical languages and in 1820 he began to study law, planning for a position in the royal administration. In 1822 he passed the legal examinations and received his license to practice law. However, his real passion was for French and foreign literature: In 1820 he translated the works of Ossian, the presumed ancient Gaelic poet, into French. At the beginning of the 1820s he frequented the salon of Juliette Récamier, a venerable figure in the literary and political life of Paris, where he met Chateaubriand and other prominent writers. In 1822, at the salons, he met Henri Beyle, twenty years older, who became one of his closest friends, and later became famous as a novelist under the pen name of Stendhal. He then began to attend the salon of Étienne Delécluze, a painter and art critic, whose members were interested in the new school of Romanticism in art and literature.
Between the spring of 1823 and the summer of 1824, he wrote his first literary works: a political and historical play called Cromwell; a satirical piece called Les Espagnols en Dannark (The Spanish in Denmark); and a set of six short theater pieces called the Théâtre de Clara Gazul, a witty commentary about the theater, politics and life which purported to be written by a Spanish actress, but which actually targeted current French politics and society. In March 1825 he read his new works at the salon of Delécluze. The first two works were quickly forgotten, but the scenes of Clara Gazul had considerable success with his literary friends. They were printed in the press under the name of their imaginary author, and were his first published work. Balzac described Clara Gazul as "a decisive step in the modern literary revolution", and its fame soon reached beyond France; the German Romanticist Goethe wrote an article praising it. Mérimée was not so gracious toward Goethe; he called Goethe's own work "a combination of genius and German naïveté".
King Louis XVIII died in 1824, and the regime of the new King, Charles X, was much more authoritarian and reactionary. Mérimée and his friends became part of the liberal opposition to the regime. On November 30, 1825, he took part in a student demonstration led by the young but already famous Victor Hugo. He was invited to Hugo's home, where he charmed the poet by making macaroni for him. Mérimée was drawn into the new romantic movement, led by the painter Eugène Delacroix and the writers Hugo, Alfred de Musset and Eugène Sue. In 1830 he attended the riotous premiere of Hugo's play Hernani, bringing with him a group of friends, including Stendhal and the Russian writer Turgenev, to support Hugo. Hugo made an anagram from his name, transforming Prosper Mérimée into Premiere Prose.
In July 1827 he published in a literary journal a new work, La Guzla. Ostensibly it was a collection of poems from the ancient Adriatic province of Illyria (modern Croatia), and it was published under another assumed name, Hyacinthe Maglanovich. The poems were highly romantic, filled with phantoms and werewolves. Mérimée drew upon many historic sources for his picturesque and gothic portrait of the Balkans, including a tale about vampires taken from the writings of the 18th-century French monk Dom Calmet. These poems, published in literary journals, were widely praised both in France and abroad. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin had translated some of the poems in the book into Russian before he was notified by Mérimée, through his Russian friend Sobolevsky, that the poems, except for one Mérimée translated from a real Serbian poet, were not authentic. A book of the poems was not a commercial success, selling only a dozen copies, but the journals and press made Mérimée an important literary figure. From then on Mérimée's stories and articles were regularly published by the two leading literary magazines of Paris, the Revue des deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris.
After La Guzla he wrote three traditional novels: La Jacquerie (June 1828) was an historical novel about a peasant revolt in the Middle Ages, filled with flamboyant costumes, picturesque details and colorful settings. The critic Henri Patin reported that novel was "lacking in drama, but many of the scenes were excellent". The second, La Famille Carvajal (1828), was a parody of the work of Lord Byron, set in 17th-century New Granada, filled with murders and crimes of passion. Many of the critics entirely missed that the novel was a parody: the Revue de Paris denounced the story for its "brutal and shameful passions". The third was La Chronique du Temps de Charles IX (1829), another historical novel, set during the reign of Charles IX of France in the 16th century. It was written three years before Victor Hugo published his historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris. Mérimée's story featured a combination of irony and extreme realism, including a detailed and bloody recreation of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. It was published in March 1829, without any great success, and its author was by then tired of the genre. "I wrote a wicked novel that bores me", he wrote to his friend Albert Stapfer.