Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée was a master of the French novella, and by profession something else entirely. As inspector-general of historical monuments he catalogued and rescued much of France's medieval architecture, backing Viollet-le-Duc's restorations, and wrote his fiction alongside that work rather than instead of it. Carmen, Colomba and Mateo Falcone share a cool, exact manner and a taste for violence in remote places, observed from a scholar's distance. Carmen is narrated at second hand by a French archaeologist, a frame the opera discards. A senator under Napoleon III, he was among the first to translate Pushkin into French.