Prosper merimee biographie courte voltaire

This story was the result of his long trip to that island researching historic monuments, and is filled with details about Corsican culture and history. When it was published in the Revue des deux Mondes it had an immense popular success. It is still widely studied in French schools as an example of Romanticism. Jealous over her, he kills another man and becomes an outlaw, then he discovers she is already married, and in jealousy he kills her husband.

When he learns she has fallen in love with a picador , he kills her, and then is arrested and sentenced to death. Carmen did not have the same popular success as Colomba. He first campaigned methodically for election to the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, the highest academic body, which he finally attained in November He patiently lobbied the members each time a member died and a seat was vacant.

He was finally elected on 14 March , on the seventeenth round of voting. It was six hundred pages long and published in five parts in the Journal des Deux Mondes between December and February In he read Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin in French, and wanted to read all of Pushkin in the original language. He began to attend the literary salon of the Russian writers in Paris, the Cercle des Arts on rue Choiseul, to perfect his Russian.

He also wrote several essays on Russian history and literature. On 8 March, he wrote to his friend Madame de Montijo: "Here we are in a republic, without enthusiasm, but determined to hold onto it because it is the sole chance of safety that we still have". In he helped organize a successful campaign to preserve the medieval Citadel of Carcassonne.

In he arranged for the crypt of Saint-Laurent in Grenoble to be classified as an historical monument. On 30 April , his mother, who lived with him and was very close to him, died. He also became entangled in a legal affair involving one of his friends, Count Libri Carrucci Della Sommaja , a professor of mathematics from Pisa Count who settled in France in and became a professor at the Sorbonne , a member of College of France , a holder of the Legion of Honor, and the Inspector General of Libraries of France.

Prosper merimee biographie courte voltaire

It was discovered that under his academic cover he was stealing valuable manuscripts from state libraries, including texts by Dante and Leonardo da Vinci , and reselling them. When he was exposed, he fled to England, taking 30, works in sixteen trunks, and claimed that he was victim of a plot. He attacked the incompetence of the prosecutors and blamed the Catholic Church for inventing the case.

On the same day that his mother died, he was summoned before the state prosecutors, and was sentenced to fifteen days in prison and fined one thousand francs. The Revue des deux Mondes was also fined two hundred francs. I answered, 'I hope that you will not find me'. He extended his hand, and I turned my back. I have not seen him since.

I consider that he is dead In November she was invited to the Palace of Fontainebleau , where the Emperor proposed marriage to her. It soon became clear the Empress was not the Emperor's only romantic interest; Napoleon III continued his affairs with old mistresses, leaving the Empress often alone. He was obliged to attend all the court events, including masked balls, though he hated balls and dancing.

He told stories, acted in plays, took part in charades, and "made a fool of himself", as he wrote to his friend Jenny Dacquin in Destiny did not make me to be a courtesan He met prominent visitors, including Otto von Bismarck , whom he described as "very much a gentleman" and "more spiritual than the usual German". He gave very little attention to his role as Senator; in seventeen years, he spoke in the chamber only three times.

However, when he informed the Emperor of this project, the Emperor expressed his own admiration for Caesar, and took over the project. The History of Julius Caesar was published on 10 March , under the name of Napoleon III, and sold one hundred forty thousand copies on the first day. He made his last long tour of monuments in , though he remained the chief inspector of monuments until It was not published until , after his death; La Chambre bleu , written as an amusement for the Empress, is the story of two lovers in a hotel room, who are terrified to find a stream of blood coming under the door of their room, then realize it is only port wine.

Lokis is a horror story borrowed from a Danish folk tale, about a creature which is half-man and half bear. This story was also written to amuse the Empress, and he read it aloud to the court in July , but the subject matter shocked the court, and the children were sent from the room. It was published in September in the Revue des deux Mondes.

He continued to work for the preservation of monuments, attending meetings of the Commission and advising Boeswillwald, who had replaced him as Inspector of Monuments in He began writing a series of twelve articles on the life of Peter the Great , based on a work in Russian by Nikolai Ustrialov, which appeared in the Journal des Savants between June and February He wrote to a friend that "Peter the Great was an abominable man surrounded by abominable villains.

That is amusing enough for me". It is richer than German, and has a marvelous clarity It has a great poet and another almost as grand, both killed in duels when they were young, and a great novelist, my friend Turgenev". In the s he still traveled regularly. He went to England every year between and , sometimes on official business, organizing the French participation in the Universal Exposition of Fine Arts in London, and in to transfer two antique Roman busts from the British Museum to the Louvre, and to see his friend Anthony Panizzi , the director of the British Museum.

In he visited Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Spain, where he attended his last bullfight. By , he was exhausted by the endless ceremonies and travels of the court, and thereafter he rarely participated in the imperial tours. He developed serious respiratory problems, and began to spend more and more time in the south of France, in Cannes. He became more and more conservative, opposing the more liberal reforms proposed by the Emperor in the s.

The political crisis between Prussia and France that began in May required his return from Cannes to Paris, where he participated in the emergency meetings of the Senate. His health worsened, and he only rarely could leave his house. The Empress sent him fruit from the imperial gardens, and on 24 June he was visited by his old lover, Valentine Delessert, and by Viollet-le-Duc.

His health continued to decline; he told a friend: "It's well over. I see myself arriving at death, and am preparing myself". The war with Prussia began with patriotic enthusiasm, but quickly turned into a debacle. The French Army and the Emperor were surrounded at Sedan. He told his friends that he dreaded the arrival of a republic, which he called "organized disorder".

In the chamber he wrote a brief note to Panizzi: "All that the most gloomy and most dark imagination could invent has been surpassed by events. There is a general collapse, a French Army which surrenders, and an Emperor who allows himself to be taken prisoner. All falls at once. At this moment the legislature is being invaded and we cannot deliberate any longer.

The National Guard which we just armed pretends to govern. Adieu , my dear Panizzi, you know what I suffer". The Third Republic was proclaimed on the same day. Despite his illness, he hurried to the Tuileries Palace hoping to see the Empress, but the Palace was surrounded by armed soldiers and a crowd. He died there on 23 September , five days before his 67th birthday.

A few months later, in May , during the Paris Commune , a mob burned his Paris home, along with his library, manuscripts, archaeological notes and collections because of his close association with the deposed Napoleon III. He lived with his mother and father in Paris until the death of his father in September From he shared an apartment with his mother on the Left Bank at 10 rue des Beaux-Arts, in the same building as the offices of the Revue des deux Mondes.

They moved to a house at 18 rue Jacob in until his mother died in He had a series of romantic affairs, sometimes carried out by correspondence. In he began a relationship by correspondence with Jenny Dacquin. Their relationship continued for ten years, but they only met six or seven times, and then rarely alone. He then had a longer and more serious relationship with Valentine Delessert.

Born in , she was the daughter of Count Alexandre de Laborde , aide-de-camp to King Louis Philippe , and she was married to Gabriel Delessert, a prominent banker and real estate developer, who was twenty years older. In he had a brief romantic liaison with the writer George Sand , which ended unhappily. After they spent a night together, they separated without warmth.

Darval promptly told her friend Alexandre Dumas , who then told all of his friends. They continued to collaborate on common goals. They both played a part in in the discovery and preservation of The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries; he declared the tapestries were of historic value, and she publicized them in one of her novels. In he assisted her when she asked that the paintings in the church of Nohant , where she lived, be classified, which he did.

He also provided a subsidy of francs to the church. At their last meeting in , he found her hostile. She came to visit him a few days before his death, but he refused to see her. When he traveled on his inspection trips around France, he often sought the company of prostitutes. He was often cynical about his relationships, writing, "There are two kinds of women; those who are worth the sacrifice of your life, and those who are worth between five and forty francs.

As for good society, I found it often enough deadly tiresome. He offered his correspondence from Stendhal to the Revue des deux Mondes , but the editor refused them as not worthy of attention. Only twenty-five copies were made, and distributed to friends of Stendhal. He responded that he simply wanted to show that Stendhal was a genius but not a saint.

He wrote that they both shared "the same apparent coldness, lightly affected, the same mantle of ice covering a shy sensibility, an ardent passion for the good and the beautiful, the same hypocrisy of egoism, the same devotion to secret friends and to the ideas of perfection". Most of his criticism was contained in his correspondence with his friends.

He described the later works of Victor Hugo as "words without ideas". He wrote his friend Madame Montijo that the book was "perfectly mediocre; not a moment that is natural". He wrote: "There is a talent there which he wastes under the pretext of realism". Describing the Fleurs du mal by Baudelaire , he wrote: "Simply mediocre, nothing dangerous.

There are a few sparks of poetry That's why I hope they don't burn him. In an essay of October , he attacked the entire genre of Realism and Naturalism in literature: "There is a tendency in almost all of our modern school to arrive at a faithful imitation of nature, but is that the objective of art? I don't believe so". He was equally scathing in his descriptions of the foreign writers of his time, with the exception of the Russians, particularly Turgenev, Pushkin and Gogol , whom he admired.

Of Charles Dickens he wrote: "[He] is the greatest one among the pygmies. He has the misfortune of being paid by the line, and he loves money". He was even harsher toward the Germans: Goethe was "a great humbug", Kant was a "chaos of obscurity", and of Wagner he wrote: "There is nothing like the Germans for audacity in stupidity". He is also known as one of the pioneers of the short story and novella, and also as an innovator in fantasy fiction.

Like the other Romantics, he used picturesque and exotic settings particularly Spain and Corsica to create an atmosphere, and looked more often at the Middle Ages than to classical Greece or Rome for his inspiration. He also frequently used themes of fantasy and the supernatural in his stories, or, like Victor Hugo, used the Middle Ages as his setting.

He used a careful selection of details, often noted during his travels, to create the setting. He often wrote about the rapport of force between his characters; man and woman, slave and master, father and son, and his stories often featured extreme passions, violence, cruelty and horror, and usually ended abruptly in a death or tragedy.

He told his stories with a certain distance and ironic tone that was particularly his own. His development and mastery of the nouvelle , a long short story or short novel, was another notable contribution to French literature. When he began his writing career in the s, the most prominent genres were the drama Victor Hugo and Musset , poetry Hugo, Lamartine and Vigny , and the autobiography Chateaubriand.

The contemporary literary critic Sainte-Beuve wrote: " He goes right to the fact, and goes immediately into action In the dialogues of his characters there is not a useless word, and in his actions he lays out in this advance exactly how and why it will have to happen". Another part of his legacy is the discovery and preservation of The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries now on display in the National Museum of Medieval History.

Saint-Marc Girardin Henri Patin Alexandre Soumet Sainte-Beuve Pierre Flourens Sanson de Pongerville Prosper de Barante Alexandre Guiraud Adolphe Thiers Jules Dufaure 4. Franz de Champagny 5. Jules Favre 6. Joseph Autran Victor de Laprade. Jules Sandeau Octave Feuillet Silvestre de Sacy Albert de Broglie Paul de Noailles Duvergier de Hauranne Ludovic Vitet Jules Janin Claude Bernard Xavier Marmier Camille Doucet Joseph Gratry Alfred de Falloux Cuvillier-Fleury