and that, as in
the _Chronique_, there is little actual interest of story. But the
phantasmagoria of gloom and blood and fire is powerfully presented. The
earlier _Theatre de Clara Gazul_,[234] one of the boldest and most
successful of all literary mystifications, belongs more or less to the
same class, which Merimee never entirely deserted.

[Sidenote: _Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement_, etc.]

The best of all these is, to my thinking, undoubtedly the _Carrosse du
Saint-Sacrement_. It is also, I believe, the only one that ever was
tried on the actual stage--it is said without success--though surely
this cannot have been the form that it took in _La Perichole_, not the
least amusing of those levities of Offenbach's which did so disgust the
Pharisees of academic music and so arride the guileless public. _Le
Carrosse_ itself is a charming thing--very, very merry and by no means
unwise--without a drop of bad blood in it, and, if no better than, very
nearly as good as it should be from the moral point of view. _La Famille
Carvajal_ has the same fault of gruesomeness as _La Jacquerie_, with
less variety, and _Une Femme est un Diable_, a fresh handling of
something like the theme of _Le Diable Amoureux_ and _The Monk_, if
better than Lewis, is not so good as Cazotte. But _L'Occasion_ is almost
great, and I think _Le Ciel et l'Enfer_ absolutely deserves that too
much lavished ticket. Indeed Dona Urraca in this, like La Perichole in
_Le Carrosse_, seems to me to put Merimee among the greatest masters of
feminine character in the nineteenth century, and far above some others
who have been held to have reached that perilous position.

At the same time, this hybrid form between _nouvelle_ and _drame_ has
some illegitimate advantages. You can, some one has said, "insinuate
character," whereas in a regular story you have to delineate it; and
though in some modern instances critics have seemed disposed to put a
higher price on the insinuation than on the delineation, not merely in
this particular form, I cannot quite agree with them. All the same,
Merimee's accomplishments in this mixed kind are a great addition to his
achievements in the story proper, and, as has been confessed before, I
should be slow to deny him the place of the greatest "little master" in
fiction all round, though I may like some little masterpieces of others
better than any of his.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Musset: charm of his dra