lonel
smiled bitterly. 'You command in chief, sir,' he said to me; 'make haste
to fortify the gorge of the redoubt with those carts, for the enemy is
in force; but General C. will send you a support.'--'Colonel,' said I,
'you are badly wounded.'--'_Foutre, mon cher_, but the redoubt is
taken.'"

"Carmen," M. Merimee's latest production, appeared a few months since in
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, which appears to have got the monopoly of
his pen, as it has of many of the cleverest pens in France. "Carmen" is
a graceful and animated sketch, in style as brilliant as anything by the
same author--in the character of its incidents less strikingly original
than some of his other tales. It is a story of Spanish life, not in
cities and palaces, in court or camp, but in the barranca and the
forest, the gipsy suburb of Seville, the woodland bivouac and smuggler's
lair. Carmen is a gipsy, a sort of Spanish Esmeralda, but without the
good qualities of Hugo's charming creation. She has no Djali; she is
fickle and mercenary, the companion of robbers, the instigator of
murder. She inveigles a young soldier from his duty, leads him into
crime, deceives and betrays him, and finally meets her death at his
hand. M. Merimee has been much in Spain, and--unlike some of his
countrymen, who apparently go thither with the sole view of spying out
the nakedness of the land and making odious comparisons, and who, in
their excess of patriotic egotism, prefer Versailles to the Alhambra,
and the Bal Mabille to a village _fandango_--he has a vivid perception
of the picturesque and characteristic, of the _couleur locale_, to use
the French term, whether in men or manners, scenery or costume, and he
embodies his impressions in pointed and sparkling phrase. As an
antiquarian and linguist, he unites qualities precious for the due
appreciation of Spain. Well-versed in the Castilian, he also displays a
familiarity with the Cantabrian tongue--that strange and difficult
_Vascuense_ which the Evil One himself, according to a provincial
proverb, spent seven years of fruitless labour in endeavouring to
acquire. And he patters Romani, the mysterious jargon of the gitanos, in
a style no way inferior--so far as we can discover--to Bible Borrow
himself. That gentleman, by the bye, when next he goes a missionarying,
would find M. Merimee an invaluable auxiliary, and the joint narrative
of their adventures would doubtless be in the highest degree curious.
The grave ea