maginative service of the career of "the false Demetrius," pretended
[18] son of Ivan the Terrible; but he alone seeks its utmost force in a
calm, matter-of-fact carefully ascertained presentment of the naked
events. Yes! In the last years of the Valois, when its fierce
passions seemed to be bursting France to pieces, you might have seen,
far away beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one of those Valois
princes had become king, a display more effective still of exceptional
courage and cunning, of horror in circumstance, of betise, of course,
of betise and a slavish capacity of being duped, in average mankind:
all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite court-ceremonial. And
Merimee's style, simple and unconcerned, but with the eye ever on its
object, lends itself perfectly to such purpose--to an almost phlegmatic
discovery of the facts, in all their crude natural colouring, as if he
but held up to view, as a piece of evidence, some harshly dyed oriental
carpet from the sumptuous floor of the Kremlin, on which blood had
fallen.

A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and incident, Merimee
valued, as if it had been personal property of his, every extant relic
of it in the art that had been most expressive of its
genius--architecture. In that grandiose art of building, the most
national, the most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in the stable
conditions of life, there were historic documents hardly less clearly
legible than the manuscript chronicle. By the mouth of those stately
Romanesque [19] churches, scattered in so many strongly characterised
varieties over the soil of France, above all in the hot, half-pagan
south, the people of empire still protested, as he understood, against
what must seem a smaller race. The Gothic enthusiasm indeed was
already born, and he shared it--felt intelligently the fascination of
the Pointed Style, but only as a further transformation of old Roman
structure; the round arch is for him still the great architectural
form, la forme noble, because it was to be seen in the monuments of
antiquity. Romanesque, Gothic, the manner of the Renaissance, of Lewis
the Fourteenth:--they were all, as in a written record, in the old
abbey church of Saint-Savin, of which Merimee was instructed to draw up
a report. Again, it was as if to his concentrated attention through
many months that deserted sanctuary of Benedict were the only thing on
earth. Its beauties, its peculiarities, its odd