Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870) was a French writer, historian and archaeologist, born in Paris. He is best known for his novellas, including Mateo Falcone, Colomba, Carmen, which Bizet turned into an opera five years after Mérimée's death, and the ghost story The Venus of Ille, written in a cool, precise style that stands apart from the Romanticism of his generation. As France's inspector-general of historic monuments from 1834 he traveled the country cataloguing and saving medieval buildings, among them the walls of Carcassonne and the abbey of Vézelay. A friend of the Empress Eugénie's family, he became a senator under Napoleon III. He also translated Pushkin and Gogol into French.