Carmen

by Prosper Merimee

  OLD MAN

  This pleases me. Till morning stay

  Beneath our tent’s cool canopy,

  And if you wake and would remain

  Still longer, we will welcome you.

  My bread, my roof are yours to share.

  Be one of us, live by our code

  Of wand’ring want and wild will!

  Tomorrow, at the break of day,

  You’ll ride off in our cart with us;

  Take any trade that pleases you:

  You’ll be an ironsmith, or bard,

  Or take a dancing bear to towns.

  ALEKO

  Then I will stay.

  ZEMFIRA

  He’ll be my man,

  And who could ever make us part?

  The old man sits in springtime sun

  To warm the blood old age has cooled;

  His daughter croons beside the crib

  A song that turns Aleko white.

  ZEMFIRA

  Oh you, my old husband

  My terrible husband

  Please slash and toss me on the pyre

  For you see, I am hardened

  I don’t fear you, I’m hardened

  Not your knife or your terrible fire

  How I loathe you, my husband

  My detestable husband

  It is for another I sigh

  That’s right, I’ve another

  My true heart’s with another

  And loving another I’ll die

  ALEKO

  Be silent now! This tires me!

  I do not like such savage songs.

  ZEMFIRA

  You do not like? What do I care?!

  It’s only for myself I sing!

  Oh come now and slash me

  Oh come now and burn me

  I won’t say a word just the same

  Oh you, my old husband

  My terrible husband

  No, you’ll never find out his name

  He’s fresher than springtime

  He’s warmer than summer

  As bright as the sun is above me!

  A young and a brave man

  Oh yes, what a brave man

  And oh, how well does he love me!

  And, oh yes, I caressed him,

  How I held and caressed him,

  In the black of the night’s quiet hum!

  How we laughed at you then, dear

  My ridiculous husband

  How we laughed at how gray you’ve become!

  ALEKO

  Zemfira! Silence! That’s enough!

  ZEMFIRA

  So then, you understand my song?

  ALEKO

  Zemfira!

  ZEMFIRA

  Shout, if shout you must!

  But you’re the subject of my song.

  She leaves, singing “My Old Husband” as she goes.

  FIRST VOICE

  It’s time…

  SECOND VOICE

  But wait…

  FIRST VOICE

  It’s time, my love.

  SECOND VOICE

  No, no, we should await the dawn.

  FIRST VOICE

  It’s late.

  SECOND VOICE

  A love so timorous!

  But soon!

  FIRST VOICE

  You’ll get me killed, my love!

  SECOND VOICE

  But soon!

  FIRST VOICE

  And if my husband wakes

  Alone?

  ALEKO

  Your husband is awake!

  Now don’t rush off—where would you go?

  You both belong here at this grave.

  ZEMFIRA

  Run off, my dear! Away!

  ALEKO

  No, wait!

  Where could you run, my handsome friend?

  Lie down!

  ALEKO stabs him.

  ZEMFIRA

  Aleko!

  GYPSY

  Oh, I die…

  ZEMFIRA

  Oh! Aleko, you’ve murdered him!

  Just look, you’re covered in his blood!

  Oh, how could you?!

  ALEKO

  It wasn’t much.

  Now go drink in his love for you.

  ZEMFIRA

  No, that’s enough! I’m not afraid!

  I hate your bloody threats of death!

  I curse the murder in your soul!

  ALEKO

  Then die yourself!

  He strikes her.

  ZEMFIRA

  I die in love…

  Enchanted by a magic force

  Within my foggy memories

  These visions now have come to life

  Of days of light, of days of grief.

  And there, where on and on the scourge

  And awful growl of war resound,

  Where Russians drew the boundaries

  Of Istanbul, and where our old

  And double-headed eagle yet

  Will crow the glories of our past—

  I used to meet them on the steppe

  On paths to long-abandoned camps,

  The peaceful wagons Gypsies drove—

  Those children humble freedom loves.

  Amid unhurried throngs of them

  I oft-times wandered through the wastes

  Or shared with them a simple meal

  And fell asleep before their fires,

  And trekking slow I loved to hear

  The joyous clamor of their songs,

  And tenderly and oftentimes

  Repeat fair Mariula’s name.

  But yet you’ll know no happiness

  For you are nature’s poorest sons!

  And ’neath the tatters of your tents

  You live out dreams of anguished pain,

  Your hearths in all your wandering

  Have not been spared calamity,

  And fatal passions know no bound,

  Nor any shield against the Fates.

  —Passages from Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsies” (1827), here translated by Ian Dreiblatt. Mérimée began to study Russian toward the end of 1847 and eventually translated a number of works from Russian, including poems and stories by Pushkin and fiction by Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and Ivan Turgenev. In 1852, he published a prose translation of “The Gypsies,” which shares many aspects with Carmen, as well other Gypsy narratives—for instance, the motif of a man from the outside who joins the Gypsy community, seduced and (usually) ultimately destroyed by a Gypsy woman. Pushkin and Mérimée never met, but they admired each other’s work, and Mérimée in particular championed the Russian author in France, writing that “Pushkin’s lyric poems are the most perfect thing I know since the Greeks.”

  Esmeralda

  In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young girl was dancing.

  Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel, is what Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that he was, could not decide at the first moment, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.

  She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender form dart about. She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined that, by day, her skin must possess that beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman women. Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both pinched and at ease in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each time that her radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black eyes darted a flash of lightning at you.

  All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open; and, in fact, when she danced thus, to the humming of the Basque tambourine, which her two pure, rounded arms raised above her head, slender, frail and vivacious as a wasp, with her corsage of gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing out, her bare shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her petticoat revealed at times, her black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural creature.

  “In truth,
” said Gringoire to himself, “she is a salamander, she is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the Menelean Mount!”

  At that moment, one of the salamander’s braids of hair became unfastened, and a piece of yellow copper which was attached to it, rolled to the ground.

  “Hé, no!” said he, “she is a gypsy!”

  All illusions had disappeared.

  She began her dance once more; she took from the ground two swords, whose points she rested against her brow, and which she made to turn in one direction, while she turned in the other; it was a purely gypsy effect. But, disenchanted though Gringoire was, the whole effect of this picture was not without its charm and its magic; the bonfire illuminated, with a red flaring light, which trembled, all alive, over the circle of faces in the crowd, on the brow of the young girl, and at the background of the Place cast a pallid reflection, on one side upon the ancient, black, and wrinkled façade of the House of Pillars, on the other, upon the old stone gibbet.

  Among the thousands of visages which that light tinged with scarlet, there was one which seemed, even more than all the others, absorbed in contemplation of the dancer. It was the face of a man, austere, calm, and sombre. This man, whose costume was concealed by the crowd which surrounded him, did not appear to be more than five and thirty years of age; nevertheless, he was bald; he had merely a few tufts of thin, gray hair on his temples; his broad, high forehead had begun to be furrowed with wrinkles, but his deep-set eyes sparkled with extraordinary youthfulness, an ardent life, a profound passion. He kept them fixed incessantly on the gypsy, and, while the giddy young girl of sixteen danced and whirled, for the pleasure of all, his revery seemed to become more and more sombre. From time to time, a smile and a sigh met upon his lips, but the smile was more melancholy than the sigh.

  The young girl, stopped at length, breathless, and the people applauded her lovingly.

  “Djali!” said the gypsy.

  Then Gringoire saw come up to her, a pretty little white goat, alert, wide-awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded hoofs, and gilded collar, which he had not hitherto perceived, and which had remained lying curled up on one corner of the carpet watching his mistress dance.

  “Djali!” said the dancer, “it is your turn.”

  And, seating herself, she gracefully presented her tambourine to the goat.

  “Djali,” she continued, “what month is this?”

  The goat lifted its fore foot, and struck one blow upon the tambourine. It was the first month in the year, in fact.

  “Djali,” pursued the young girl, turning her tambourine round, “what day of the month is this?”

  Djali raised his little gilt hoof, and struck six blows on the tambourine.

  “Djali,” pursued the Egyptian, with still another movement of the tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?”

  Djali struck seven blows. At that moment, the clock of the Pillar House rang out seven.

  The people were amazed.

  “There’s sorcery at the bottom of it,” said a sinister voice in the crowd. It was that of the bald man, who never removed his eyes from the gypsy.

  She shuddered and turned round; but applause broke forth and drowned the morose exclamation.

  It even effaced it so completely from her mind, that she continued to question her goat.

  “Djali, what does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the pistoliers of the town do, at the procession of Candlemas?”

  Djali reared himself on his hind legs, and began to bleat, marching along with so much dainty gravity, that the entire circle of spectators burst into a laugh at this parody of the interested devoutness of the captain of pistoliers.

  “Djali,” resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing success, “how preaches Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the ecclesiastical court?”

  The goat seated himself on his hind quarters, and began to bleat, waving his fore feet in so strange a manner, that, with the exception of the bad French, and worse Latin, Jacques Charmolue was there complete,—gesture, accent, and attitude.

  And the crowd applauded louder than ever.

  “Sacrilege! profanation!” resumed the voice of the bald man.

  The gypsy turned round once more.

  “Ah!” said she, “ ‘tis that villanous man!” Then, thrusting her under lip out beyond the upper, she made a little pout, which appeared to be familiar to her, executed a pirouette on her heel, and set about collecting in her tambourine the gifts of the multitude.

  Big blanks, little blanks, targes and eagle lizards showered into it.

  All at once, she passed in front of Gringoire. Gringoire put his hand so recklessly into his pocket that she halted. “The devil!” said the poet, finding at the bottom of his pocket the reality, that is, to say, a void. In the meantime, the pretty girl stood there, gazing at him with her big eyes, and holding out her tambourine to him and waiting…… It was the young gypsy who was singing.

  Her voice was like her dancing, like her beauty. It was indefinable and charming; something pure and sonorous, aerial, winged, so to speak. There were continual outbursts, melodies, unexpected cadences, then simple phrases strewn with aerial and hissing notes; then floods of scales which would have put a nightingale to rout, but in which harmony was always present; then soft modulations of octaves which rose and fell, like the bosom of the young singer. Her beautiful face followed, with singular mobility, all the caprices of her song, from the wildest inspiration to the chastest dignity. One would have pronounced her now a mad creature, now a queen.

  The words which she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire, and which seemed to him to be unknown to herself, so little relation did the expression which she imparted to her song bear to the sense of the words. Thus, these four lines, in her mouth, were madly gay,—

  Un cofre de gran riqueza

  Hallaron dentro un pilar,

  Dentro del, nuevas banderas

  Con figuras de espantar.

  And an instant afterwards, at the accents which she imparted to this stanza,—

  Alarabes de cavallo

  Sin poderse menear,

  Con espadas, y los cuellos,

  Ballestas de buen echar,

  Gringoire felt the tears start to his eyes. Nevertheless, her song breathed joy, most of all, and she seemed to sing like a bird, from serenity and heedlessness.

  The gypsy’s song had disturbed Gringoire’s revery as the swan disturbs the water. He listened in a sort of rapture, and forgetfulness of everything. It was the first moment in the course of many hours when he did not feel that he suffered.

  —From Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), taken from Isabel F. Hapgood’s 1888 English translation. Pierre Gringoire is a poor street poet, and Esmeralda a young Gypsy girl; when she shows compassion to the hunchback Quasimodo, she wins his undying love and loyalty. Later in life, relations between Mérimée and Hugo cooled, but when they were younger, they had been friendly: in fact, the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes recounts in The Romantic School in France that once Mérimée demonstrated to Hugo (and Hugo’s cook and entire family) the proper way to make macaroni à l’italienne. Hugo, in turn, made an anagram out of Mérimée’s name, dubbing him “M. Première Prose.”

  “The wild air bloweth in our lungs”

  The Romany Girl

  The sun goes down, and with him takes

  The coarseness of my poor attire;

  The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame

  Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher.

  Pale Northern girls! you scorn our race;

  You captives of your air-tight halls,

  Wear out in-doors your sickly days,

  But leave us the horizon walls.

  And if I take you, dames, to task,

  And say it frankly without guile,

  Then you are Gypsies in a mask,

  And I the lady all the while.

  If on the heath, below the moon,

  I court and
play with paler blood,

  Me false to mine dare whisper none,—

  One sallow horseman knows me good.

  Go, keep your cheek’s rose from the rain,

  For teeth and hair with shopmen deal;

  My swarthy tint is in the grain,

  The rocks and forest know it real.

  The wild air bloweth in our lungs,

  The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,

  The birds gave us our wily tongues,

  The panther in our dances flies.

  You doubt we read the stars on high,

  Nathless we read your fortunes true;

  The stars may hide in the upper sky,

  But without glass we fathom you.

  —This poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson was published in the first issue of The Atlantic in November 1857 and later in his second collection, May Day and Other Pieces (1867). Emerson had reviewed George Borrow’s The Zincali for the magazine The Dial in 1841, writing: “This book is very entertaining, and yet, out of mere love and respect to human nature, we must add that this account of the Gypsy race must be imperfect and very partial, and that the author never sees his object quite near enough … [W]e think that a traveller of another way of thinking would not find the Gypsy so void of conscience as Mr. Borrow paints him … [W]e suspect the walls of separation between the Gypsy and the surrounding population are less firm than we are here given to understand.”