Grove Koger

Prosper Merimée’s travels in Spain in 1830 and 1831 yielded a novella, Carmen, that has eclipsed his other works. As he wrote to his friend Doña María Manuela Kirkpatrick, the Countess of Montijo, the immediate source for the work was a story “about that ruffian from Málaga who had killed his mistress.… As I have been studying the Gypsies for some time, I have made my heroine a Gypsy.” (Merimée was using the term then commonly applied to the Roma people, and when not quoting him, I’ll switch to more modern usage.)

In his 1970 biography of Merimée (Eyre & Spottiswoode), A.W. Raitt writes that “Carmen succeeds magnificently because there, more than anywhere else, he takes his conception of passion to its logical—and intensely tragic—conclusion.”

The first three parts of the novella appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes in 1845. In the first, the narrator is searching for the site of an ancient battle in southernmost Spain when he and his guide meet a stranger. The suspicious guide tells the narrator that the stranger is the robber Don José Navarro, but, nevertheless, the narrator befriends him and shares a meal with him, and the three end up spending the night in an inn. The guide sets off surreptitiously to alert the authorities, but the narrator, who seems to sense a kind of kindred spirit in Navarro, warns the robber of his imminent arrest, thus allowing him to escape.

In the second section of the novella, the narrator meets the beautiful Romani woman Carmen in the city of Córdoba and asks her to tell his fortune. Before she can finish, however, the session is interrupted by the same Don José. After he leaves her rooms, the narrator realizes that his watch is missing.

In the third section of the novella, which takes place some time later in the same city, the narrator learns that Don José has been captured and is to be executed. He then visits the jail, where the condemned man, who remembers the narrator’s kindness, tells him his story. We learn of Don José‘s initial descent into a life of crime and his involvement with Carmen and her band of smugglers. Despite omens clearly indicating that he will murder her, the woman becomes involved with him for a time but ultimately loses interest. “Carmen,” she insists, “will always be free” —at which Don José stabs her.

As Raitt indicates, Carmen is a tale of passion, a narrative in which Carmen and Don José seemingly cannot help themselves. It may be that the narrator himself cannot help but feel an identification with Don José, recognizing in the unfortunate robber a more primitive and, presumably, more authentic version of himself. Years later, in the 1910 story “The Secret Sharer,” Joseph Conrad dramatized the same kind of situation.

A year after his novella’s original appearance, Merimée added a short fourth section about the ethnic group he called Gypsies. It’s a purely expository piece involving what was then known about the Roma and their language, and adds nothing to the dramatic story of Don José and Carmen. Most editions of the novella include it, although my 1989 Oxford / World’s Classics selection of Merimée’s works adds it as an appendix at the end of the volume.

Raitt urges readers to put their knowledge of the opera aside: “To appreciate Carmen at its true worth, it is … necessary to forget all about [Georges] Bizet; whatever the musical and dramatic merits of the opera, it is in its basic schema no more than an emasculated and prettified version of Merimée’s tale.” He adds that the tale has a “savage power” that the “more conventional picturesqueness of Bizet’s adaptation cannot match.”  

Raitt’s comments are certainly correct as regards the opera’s plot. Its libretto was written by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac, and has Don José lose Carmen to a bullfighter, Escamillo, prompting the robber to kill her. The drastic change in the plot allows Bizet to play up the supposedly colorful aspects of the Spanish bullfight, but, oddly enough, his opera (which premiered in Paris on March 3, 1875) was not an immediate success. Its picture of criminality and lower middle class life were not only unusual but nearly scandalous, prompting negative reviews and poor attendance. Bizet himself died after the work’s 33rd performance, and, when it was revived later that year, it ran for only 12 more performances.

Bizet’s actual music, however, captures the passion of the novella. Today it’s regarded as a masterpiece, and is (I would guess) the world’s most popular opera. I personally don’t find the conventions of opera interesting, but I enjoy the two suites from its music, put together after Bizet’s death by his friend Ernest Guiraud. Thanks to YouTube, you can listen to them here and here.

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