Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée was born in Paris on 28 September 1803 and moved through Romanticism as a pioneer of the novella form, writing compressed stories that carried full novelistic weight. His 1845 Carmen gave Bizet the bones for an opera that would outlive them both. But from 1830 to 1860 he held a parallel life as inspector of French historical monuments, a post that sent him across the country marking what deserved to survive: he secured the medieval citadel of Carcassonne, oversaw the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris's façade, and with George Sand identified a set of fifteenth-century tapestries depicting a lady and a unicorn, ensuring their preservation in what became the Musée national du Moyen Âge. He taught himself Russian out of affection for the language and translated Pushkin and Gogol into French. He died on 23 September 1870; France's official monument database now carries his name.