Carmen (11 page)

Adieu! dear countess. I hope that your voyage to Salamanca does not keep you from making the other one. With tenderness and love for your girls.

—
A
letter from
Mérimée
to the
Countess Montijo
, excerpted from
Lettres de Prosper Mérimée à Madame de Montijo
(trans. Jean-Patrick Grillet). In 1830,
Mérimée
spent six months traveling around Spain, during which time he began a lifelong friendship with the aristocratic Montijo family, especially the countess, an intelligent, cultured, and ambitious woman. (The countess’s younger daughter,
Eugenia
, would marry
Emperor Napoleon III
in 1853, and on her recommendation
Mérimée
was made a senator of the French Empire.) Between 1831 and 1833,
Mérimée
published a series of four
Lettres d’Espagne
in the
Revue de Paris.
These letters recount bullfights, bandits, Spanish customs, and encounters with Gypsies, and the story
Mérimée
tells in the third letter, about the bandit
José Maria
, is another direct precursor of
Carmen.

I had always suspected the geographers of not knowing what they were talking about when they placed the battle-field of Munda in the country of the Bastuli-Poeni, near the modern Monda, some two leagues north of Marbella. According to my own conjectures concerning the text of the anonymous author of the
Bellum Hispaniense
, and in view of certain information collected in the Duke of Ossuna’s excellent library, I believed that we should seek in the vicinity of Montilla the memorable spot where for the last time Caesar played double or quits against the champions of the republic. Happening to be in Andalusia in the early autumn of 1830, I made quite a long excursion for the purpose of setting at rest such doubts as I still entertained. A memoir which I propose to publish ere long will, I trust, leave no further uncertainty in the minds of all honest archaeologists. Pending the time when my deliverance shall solve at last the geographical problem which is now holding all the learning of Europe in suspense, I propose to tell you a little story; it has no bearing on the question of the actual location of Munda.

—
From the opening lines of
Carmen.

A map of Andalusia from a 1635 Elsevier edition of
Caesar
’s Commentaries
(first written ca. 50
BCE
)
,
the book
Carmen’s
narrator carries at the beginning of the story
.

Barcelona, 1845

I have reached the goal of my long journey and have been admirably received by my archivist, who had already prepared my tables and the ancient books in which I shall lose what remains of my sight. To find his
despacho
, a gothic hall of the fourteenth century must be traversed, and a marble court planted with orange-trees as tall as our lime-trees, and covered with ripe fruit. This is very poetical, and as regards comfort and luxury recalls, as does my chamber, the Asiatic caravanserai. However, it is better than Andalusia though the natives are inferior and have a fatal defect in my eyes, or rather ears, in that I understand nothing of their gibberish. At Perpignan, I met two gypsies who were cropping mules, and I spoke
caló
to them to the great horror of my companion, a colonel of artillery; while they, finding me even more skilled than themselves in the
patois
, offered a striking testimony to my attainments of which I was not a little proud. In summing up the results of my journey, my conviction is that it was unnecessary to come so far, and that my history could have been satisfactorily accomplished without disturbing the venerable dust of Aragonese archives.

—
From one of
Mérimée’s
letters to
Jeanne Françoise Dacquin. Mérimée
wrote
Carmen
in 1845 while in the midst of researching a history of
Don Pedro, the notoriously cruel king of Castile and León who reigned from 1350 to 1369. Like the narrator of
Carmen,
Mérimée
was an antiquarian, at first in an amateur capacity. Then, in 1834,
Mérimée
was appointed Inspector General of Historical Monuments for France, and for the next eighteen years he spent most of his summers traveling to small towns throughout the country to study churches, chateaux, and artwork as part of an enormous project to catalog and preserve France’s cultural heritage, the first sustained attempt to do so
.

M. Borrow, an English missionary, the author of two very interesting works on the gypsies of Spain, whom he had undertaken to convert at the expense of the Bible Society, asserts that there is no known instance of a
gitana
having a weakness for a man not of her race.

—
From the last chapter of
Carmen.

Saint Cloud, August 1866

You asked me whence I derived my knowledge of the gypsy dialect: from M. Borrow whose book is one of the most curious that I ever read. What he relates of the gypsies is perfectly true, and his personal observations agree perfectly with my own, except on one point. In his character of clergyman he was naturally deceived in matters respecting which I, as a Frenchman and
laic
, have a clearer insight from personal experience. It is exceedingly singular, however, that this man gifted in languages to the extent of speaking the Cali dialect, should possess so little grammatical perspicacity as not to see at a glance that many words unknown in Spanish have remained in this dialect. He asserts that only the roots of Sanskrit words have been preserved.

—
From one of
Mérimée’s
letters to
Jeanne Françoise Dacquin. George Borrow
, an agent of the British Bible Society, wrote a number of popular books about Gypsies, and it was
Borrow’s
translation of the Gospel of Luke into
caló
(published in 1837 and referenced in
Mérimée’s
letter to the
Countess Montijo
, above) that reawakened
Mérimée’s
interest in Spanish Gypsies in the early 1840s
. Borrow’s
books were part of a small flood of scholarly publications on Gypsies during the period, allowing concrete information to replace, somewhat, Romantic imaginings
.

It is with some diffidence that the author ventures to offer the present work to the public.

The greater part of it has been written under very peculiar circumstances, such as are not in general deemed at all favourable for literary composition;—at considerable intervals, during a period of nearly five years passed in Spain—in moments snatched from more important pursuits—chiefly in ventas and posadas, whilst wandering through the country in the arduous and unthankful task of distributing the Gospel among its children.

Owing to the causes above stated, he is aware that his work must not unfrequently appear somewhat disjointed and unconnected, and the style rude and unpolished: he has, nevertheless, permitted the tree to remain where he felled it, having, indeed, subsequently enjoyed too little leisure to make much effectual alteration.

At the same time he flatters himself that the work is not destitute of certain qualifications to entitle it to approbation. The author’s acquaintance with the Gypsy race in general dates from a very early
period of his life, which considerably facilitated his intercourse with the Peninsular portion, to the elucidation of whose history and character the present volumes are more particularly devoted. Whatever he has asserted, is less the result of reading than of close observation, he having long since come to the conclusion that the Gypsies are not a people to be studied in books, or at least in such books as he believes have hitherto been written concerning them.

Throughout he has dealt more in facts than in theories, of which he is in general no friend. True it is, that no race in the world affords, in many points, a more extensive field for theory and conjecture than the Gypsies, who are certainly a very mysterious people come from some distant land, no mortal knows why, and who made their first appearance in Europe at a dark period, when events were not so accurately recorded as at the present time.

But if he has avoided as much as possible touching upon subjects which must always, to a certain extent, remain shrouded in obscurity; for example, the original state and condition of the Gypsies, and the causes which first brought them into Europe; he has stated what they are at the present day, what he knows them to be from a close scrutiny of their ways and habits, for which, perhaps, no one ever enjoyed better opportunities; and he has, moreover, given—not a few words culled expressly for the purpose of supporting a theory, but one entire dialect of their language, collected with much trouble and difficulty; and to this he humbly calls the attention of the learned, who, by comparing it with certain languages, may decide as to the countries in
which the Gypsies have lived or travelled.

With respect to the Gypsy rhymes in the second volume, he wishes to make one observation which cannot be too frequently repeated, and which he entreats the reader to bear in mind; they are
Gypsy compositions
, and have little merit save so far as they throw light on the manner of thinking and speaking of the Gypsy people, or rather a portion of them, and as to what they are capable of effecting in the way of poetry. It will, doubtless, be said that the rhymes are
trash—
even were it so, they are original, and on that account, in a philosophic point of view, are more valuable than the most brilliant compositions pretending to describe Gypsy life, but written by persons who are not of the Gypsy sect. Such compositions, however replete with fiery sentiments, and allusions to freedom and independence, are certain to be tainted with affectation. Now in the Gypsy rhymes there is no affectation, and on that very account they are different in every respect from the poetry of those interesting personages who figure, under the names of Gypsies, Gitanos, Bohemians, &c., in novels and on the boards of the theatre.

It will, perhaps, be objected to the present work, that it contains little that is edifying in a moral or Christian point of view: to such an objection the author would reply, that the Gypsies are not a Christian people, and that their morality is of a peculiar kind, not calculated to afford much edification to what is generally termed the respectable portion of society. Should it be urged that certain individuals have found them very different from what they are represented in
these volumes, he would frankly say that he yields no credit to the presumed fact, and at the same time he would refer to the vocabulary contained in the second volume, whence it will appear that the words
hoax
and
hocus
have been immediately derived from the language of the Gypsies, who, there is good reason to believe, first introduced the system into Europe, to which those words belong.

The author entertains no ill-will towards the Gypsies; why should he, were he a mere carnal reasoner? He has known them for upwards of twenty years, in various countries, and they never injured a hair of his head, or deprived him of a shred of his raiment; but he is not deceived as to the motive of their forbearance: they thought him a Bom, and on this supposition they hurt him not, their love of “the blood” being their most distinguishing characteristic. He derived considerable assistance from them in Spain, as in various instances they officiated as colporteurs in the distribution of the Gospel: but on that account he is not prepared to say that they entertained any love for the Gospel or that they circulated it for the honour of Tebleque the Saviour. Whatever they did for the Gospel in Spain, was done in the hope that he whom they conceived to be their brother had some purpose in view which was to contribute to the profit of the Cales, or Gypsies, and to terminate in the confusion and plunder of the Busne, or Gentiles. Convinced of this, he is too little of an enthusiast to rear, on such a foundation, any fantastic edifice of hope which would soon tumble to the ground.

The cause of truth can scarcely be forwarded by enthusiasm,
which is almost invariably the child of ignorance and error. The author is anxious to direct the attention of the public towards the Gypsies; but he hopes to be able to do so without any romantic appeals in their behalf, by concealing the truth, or by warping the truth until it becomes falsehood. In the following pages he has depicted the Gypsies as he has found them, neither aggravating their crimes nor gilding them with imaginary virtues. He has not expatiated on “their gratitude towards good people, who treat them kindly and take an interest in their welfare”; for he believes that of all beings in the world they are the least susceptible of such a feeling. Nor has he ever done them injustice by attributing to them licentious habits, from which they are, perhaps, more free than any race in the creation.