Carmen

CARMEN. Merimee's short novel, the heroine is a romantic conception of the classic Giianilla of Cervantes. She com bines the virtues and vices of her race carried to extremes. In her many-sided roles, either as cigarette-maker, a fortune teller, a secret agent of highwaymen and smugglers, or as the fun-loving dancer and the devoted nurse of her wounded companions, she is intensely passionate or revengeful, greedy or extravagant, selfishly sensuous or ideally self-sacrificing, but always exercises a strong fascination upon all of those who willingly or unwillingly come under her fateful influence. This fascination

has transformed the hero, Don Jose, from an honest sergeant in the army into a smuggler, a bandit and a murderer, when, driven by jeal ousy, he stabs Carmen herself after he had gained undisputed possession of her by killing her gypsy husband in a trumped-up duel.

Although such adventures and strange pic tures may startle and puzzle the reader, they nevertheless leave a strong impression because in spite of an exaggerated individualism, they show a solid humanistic foundation, and on the part of the author an accurate sense of ob servation even if tinged with a certain dilet tantism and indifference bordering on cynicism. Dramatized by Meilhac and Halevy,

L. A. LoisEAux.