[5] 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.

Balzac described Clara Gazul as "a decisive step in the modern literary revolution",[6] and its fame soon reached beyond France; the German Romanticist Goethe wrote an article praising it.

The poems were highly romantic, filled with phantoms and werewolves, and were intended as satirical commentary on the exaggerated and bombastic style of the era that people would get swept up in.

[2] 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.

Mérimée's story featured a combination of irony and extreme realism, including a detailed and bloody recreation of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

[11] In a short period Mérimée wrote two of his most famous novellas, Mateo Falcone, about a tragic vendetta in Corsica, and Tamango, a drama on a slave-trading ship, which were published in the Revue de Paris, and had considerable success.

In June 1830 he traveled to Spain, which he explored at a leisurely pace, spending many hours in the Prado Museum in Madrid, attending bullfights, and studying Moorish architecture in Córdoba and Seville.

In October 1830 he met Cipriano Portocarrero, a liberal Spanish aristocrat and the future Count of Montijo, who shared many of his literary and historical interests and political views.

"[13] He turned out to be an efficient administrator, and was put in charge of organizing the response to the epidemic of cholera which struck Paris between 29 March and 1 October 1832, killing eighteen thousand Parisians.

[16] On 27 May 1833, Prime Minister Thiers named Mérimée inspector-general of historical monuments, with a salary of eight thousand francs a year, and all travel expenses paid.

The Basilica of St Denis had been stripped of its stained glass and monumental tombs, while the statues on the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and the spire had been taken down.

In 1832 Victor Hugo wrote an article for the Revue des deux Mondes which declared war against the "massacre of ancient stones" and the "demolishers" of France's past.

Finally, he wrote a series of books for a popular audience about the monuments of each region, describing vividly a France that he declared was "more unknown than Greece or Egypt".

In 1840–41, Mérimée made an extended tour of Italy, Greece and Asia Minor, visiting and writing about archaeological sites and ancient civilizations.

[26] In 1841, during one of his inspection tours, he stayed at the Château of Boussac, Creuse in the Limousin district of central France, in the company of George Sand, who lived nearby.

[28] In 1861 they were purchased by the French state and brought to Paris, where they were restored and put on display in the Musée national du Moyen Âge, which Mérimée had helped create, where they can be seen today.

It was discovered that under his academic cover he was stealing valuable manuscripts from state libraries, including texts by Dante and Leonardo da Vinci, and reselling them.

He served his sentence inside one of his listed historic monuments, the Palais de la Cité prison, passing the time studying Russian irregular verbs.

The new Emperor gave a priority to the preservation of historic monuments, particularly the restoration of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and Mérimée kept his position and for a time continued his tours of inspection.

Destiny did not make me to be a courtesan..."[36] The only events he really enjoyed were the stays at the Château de Compiègne, where he organized lectures and discussions for the Emperor with leading French cultural figures, including Louis Pasteur and Charles Gounod.

He wrote his last works, three novellas, in the genre of the fantastic: Djoûmane is a story about a soldier in North Africa who sees a sorcerer give a young woman to a snake, then realizes it was just a dream.

He began writing a series of twelve articles on the life of Peter the Great, based on a work in Russian by Nikolai Ustrialov, which appeared in the Journal des Savants between June 1864 and February 1868.

Born in 1806, she was the daughter of Count Alexandre de Laborde, aide-de-camp to King Louis Philippe, and she was married to Gabriel Delessert, a prominent banker and real estate developer, who was twenty years older.

[52] The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire compared the personality of Mérimée with that of the painter Eugène Delacroix, both men suddenly thrust into celebrity in the artistic and literary world of Paris.

He wrote that they both shared "the same apparent coldness, lightly affected, the same mantle of ice covering a shy sensibility, an ardent passion for the good and the beautiful, the same hypocrisy of egoism, the same devotion to secret friends and to the ideas of perfection".

Mérimée's best-known literary work is the novella Carmen, though it is known principally because of the fame of the opera made from the story by Georges Bizet after his death.

His novellas, particularly Colomba, Mateo Falcone, Tamango and La Vénus d'Ille, are widely taught in French schools as examples of vivid style and concision.

Like the other Romantics, he used picturesque and exotic settings (particularly Spain and Corsica) to create an atmosphere, and looked more often at the Middle Ages than to classical Greece or Rome for his inspiration.

He often wrote about the rapport of force between his characters; man and woman, slave and master, father and son, and his stories often featured extreme passions, violence, cruelty and horror, and usually ended abruptly in a death or tragedy.

[61] Mérimée's other important cultural legacy is the system of classification of historic monuments that he established, and the major sites that he saved, included the walled citadel of Carcasonne, and his part in the foundation of the National Museum of Medieval History in Paris.