Prosper Mérimée: Colomba (1840)
Colomba is brilliant -- that's undeniable. You can doubt that it's good, but not that it's brilliant. At any rate it was Mérimée's greatest success in his own lifetime and has been a popular classic across Europe ever since.
This post is for after-reading not before-reading. Spoilers will follow immediately after these images!
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| Jacket of a Danish eBook of Colomba |
"Ja, det var han, men han havde ikke den lykke at falde på ærens mark. Han døde på Korsika for ti år siden. Hvilket vidunderligt hav! I ti år har jeg ikke set Middelhavet. Syntes De ikke at Middelhavet er smukkere end oceanet, mademoiselle?"
An anonymous translation into Danish, first published in 1902. The jacket is based on Corot's 1866 painting "Agostina".
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| Jacket of a Spanish edition of Colomba |
[Image edited from https://en.todocoleccion.net/old-books-classics/prosper-merimee-colomba~x142389434 . Published by Ediciones Generales Anaya.
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| The Curé, Brandolaccio and Chilina |
[Image source: https://www.catawiki.eu/l/38120619-prosper-merimee-regis-manset-colomba-1944 . One of Régis Manset's illustrations for a 1944 edition. ]
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| Jacket of a German edition of Colomba |
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Is Colomba a "Mädchenroman", a "girl's book" ? There are certainly times, as the story winds on, when I caught a flavour of Five Go On A Vendetta -- perhaps when Lydia Nevil and her father are providing false testimony to the Prefect (XVIII), or when the jolly bandits are waving their handkerchiefs to our departing heroes (XX).
But of course these scenes come late on in Colomba, when the author has achieved his main object and is allowing a freer play to his irony. It's a far cry from the relentless tension of earlier brother-and-sister scenes such as this:
He viewed with alarm the expectations everyone seemed to have of him regarding the Barricinis. He realized that he was already beginning to regard the opinion of Pietranera as if it were that of the world at large. He would be obliged to have his revenge, or else be taken for a coward. But on whom was he to take revenge? He could not believe that the Barricinis were guilty of murder. Certainly they were the enemies of his family, but it needed the crude prejudices of his compatriots to make one capable of attributing a murder to them . . .. . . The child was thin and pale, her skin burned by the sun; but her eyes shone with intelligence. Seeing Orso, she stopped timidly and dropped him a rustic curtsy; then she spoke softly to Colomba and handed her a freshly killed pheasant."Thank you, Chili," said Colomba. "Thank your uncle. Is he well?""Very well, miss. At your service, miss. I couldn't come sooner because he was very late. I was three hours in the maquis waiting for him.""So you've had no supper?""Why no, miss, I had no time.""You shall be given some supper. Has your uncle still got enough bread?""Not much, miss, but it's gunpowder he's really short of. The chestnuts are ready now, so he only needs gunpowder.""I'll give you a loaf for him, and some gunpowder. Tell him to be sparing of it, it's expensive.""Colomba," said Orso in French, "who is that you're giving charity to?""A poor bandit from this village," Colomba replied in the same language. "This little girl is his niece.""It seems to me you could give to a worthier cause. Why provide a scoundrel with gunpowder, when he will use it to commit crimes? If it weren't for the deplorable partiality everyone here seems to have for bandits, Corsica would long since have been rid of them.""The wickedest people in our land are not those who have taken to the country.""Give them bread if you wish, no one should be refused it. But I won't have you giving them ammunition.""Brother," said Colomba gravely, "you are the master here, and everything in this house belongs to you. But, I give you due warning, if need be I will give this little girl my mezzaro to sell, sooner than refuse gunpowder to a bandit. Refuse him gunpowder! You might as well hand him over to the gendarmes. How is he to defend himself against them, except with his cartridges?"Meanwhile the little girl was devouring a piece of bread voraciously, and looking attentively, first at Colomba, then at her brother, trying to read from their expressions the meaning of what they were saying."Anyway, what has he done, this bandit of yours? What crime has driven him to take refuge in the maquis?""Brandolaccio has committed no crime," exclaimed Colomba. "He killed Giovan' Opizzo, who had murdered his father while he was away in the army."Orso turned away, took the lamp, and without replying went up to his bedroom. Thereupon Colomba gave gunpowder and provisions to the child and accompanied her back to the door, repeating to her: "Above all, make sure your uncle takes good care of Orso!"
(from Chapter X, translation by Nicholas Jotcham in Carmen and Other Stories, Oxford World's Classics, 1989)
"Here is your father's shirt, Orso," she said. And she threw it into his lap. "Here is the lead that struck him down." And she placed on the shirt two tarnished bullets. "Orso, my brother!" she cried, throwing herself into his arms and embracing him violently. "Orso, you shall avenge him!" She clasped him with a sort of frenzy, kissed the bullets and the shirt, then went out of the room, leaving her brother seated in his chair as if paralysed.Orso remained motionless for some time, not daring to put the appalling relics out of his sight. At last, making an effort, he put them back in the casket and hastened to the other end of the room, where he threw himself onto his bed with his head turned to the wall and buried in his pillow, as if trying to blot out the sight of some ghost. His sister's last words kept resounding in his ears, and he seemed to hear a fatal, inexorable oracle demanding blood of him, and innocent blood at that . . .
(from Chapter XI)
Orso and Colomba, brother and sister, constitute the engine-room of the story. They haven't met for ten years or more and have developed along different lines. Orso is educated, cosmopolitan, and has lost his inwardness with Corsican village culture. For Colomba, uneducated and isolated, Corsican village culture is all she has and she lives it intensely. When their father is murdered the stark disparity in their outlooks comes into the open.
Mérimée's elaborate preparation, in those opening chapters where Orso's real character is contrasted with the Nevils' ignorant and stereotyped expectations, means that we see everything that happens in these later scenes from Orso's point of view. Orso is a Corsican who is civilised, sensitive, experienced in the wider world, courageous, competent, an agreeable companion. Most readers would have shared his view of the world rather than Colomba's (though I say that with less certainty in 2021). And he's already supplied an advance commentary on these later scenes: "Once she has led me to the edge of the precipice and my head is spinning, she will push me into the abyss," he tells Lydia Nevil (VII). Isn't this exactly what we're seeing?
Orso's views are merely sensible, from his own "rational" perspective. He respects what is established by official inquiry, not mere personal suspicions. He can't believe in a family of the gentry being guilty of his father's murder. He's very ready to think it must have been the bandit Agostini, because bandits are criminals by definition and that's the kind of thing they do. And, conveniently, Agostini is dead; Orso doesn't want to have to take vengeance into his own hands, Corsican-style. He wants to behave like his peers in the French military. His personal prestige is at stake when it comes to being law-abiding and condoning only certain types of violence. Besides, Orso didn't feel particularly close to his father. Within the cosmopolitan culture that he's imbibed abroad, it's a relevant factor.
I wholly bought into Orso's viewpoint while I was reading the story; both his views on the murder and his commentary on what Colomba is doing to him. I had no doubt that the upright and rational Orso was hurtling towards tragedy, propelled by his sister's fanaticism. When we foresee something so strongly, it remains an element of the story even if, as here, events don't quite turn out that way.
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And eventually we'll learn that Orso's conclusions were wrong and Colomba's were right. More or less. Mérimée both weights and withholds the evidence. Absolute certainty isn't available, as is usually the case in life.
But the words exchanged by Colomba and old Barricini at the very end of the story are key.
"Mercy!" he croaked. "Mercy! Aren't you satisfied? The page -- the one I burned -- how did you manage to read it? -- And why both of them? Why Orlanduccio? You could find nothing to say against him. You should have left me one -- just one . . . Orlanduccio! His name was not written.""I had to have them both," Colomba said to him quietly in Corsican. "The boughs have been lopped; if the stump had not been rotten, I would have uprooted it too. Come, stop complaining, you don't have long to suffer. I suffered for two years!"
— Grâce ! s’écria celui-ci d’une voix rauque ; grâce ! n’es-tu pas satisfaite ? Cette feuille… que j’avais brûlée… comment as-tu fait pour la lire ?… Mais pourquoi tous les deux ?…Orlanduccio, tu n’as rien pu lire contre lui… il fallait m’en laisser un… un seul… Orlanduccio… tu n’as pas lu son nom…— Il me les fallait tous les deux, lui dit Colomba à voix basse et dans le dialecte corse. Les rameaux sont coupés ; et, si la souche n’était pas pourrie, je l’eusse arrachée. Va, ne te plains pas ; tu n’as pas longtemps à souffrir. Moi, j’ai souffert deux ans !”
(Chapter XXI)
So Barricini admits that he did destroy the page on which her father wrote the name of his killer, as Colomba always asserted. Evidently the name was Vincentello, Barricini's other son. In all likelihood the assertion was true, since Barricini doesn't protest Vincentello's innocence. (It sheds new light on Vincentello's refusal to approach the dying colonel in Chapter VI.)
Barricini doesn't say Orlanduccio was innocent, only that his name was not written. Evidence from the post mortem (VI) had suggested there were two assailants; della Rebbia might have been preparing to defend Orlanduccio's frontal attack when Vincentello struck him down from behind. Or it could have been the other way round: della Rebbia might have written down the name Vincentello because that's the assailant he saw. Or it could be that a man at the point of death only managed to write one name though he would have wanted to write two.
Barricini's "proofs" at the time of the inquest were apparently fraudulent ("He proved that he had spent the whole evening in the village; that his son Vincentello was with him outside the mairie at the time of the crime; and that his son Orlanduccio, who had been taken ill with a fever that same day, had not stirred from his bed.") We're left with only the barest trace of doubt about the Barricinis' guilt.
What we do know perfectly well, and what Barricini also knows (if he weren't so spooked by Colomba's appearance), is that she never did read the torn-out page. Until this moment she never did have any proof of the Barricinis' guilt. She only has that potent but dangerous feeling called moral certainty. When her father is murdered, it's the family enemies that she holds responsible; because she's a Corsican, because she's lived in Pietranera all her life, because she knows the way things are, because she's surrounded by all the shepherds and village gossips who all "know" what she "knows", not on the basis of facts but what can literally be termed prejudice.
"Colomba!" said Orso. "I've asked you a number of times not to speak to me again of the Barricinis, and of your groundless suspicions ... " (IX)
"Groundless", "baseless", these are the words we use to try and suppress convictions such as Colomba's. One of the upsetting things about Colomba is its reminder that such frighteningly benighted instincts and intuitions often turn out to be right, after all. But given all the horrors they've led to when they've been wrong, it's a concession I'll only make through gritted teeth.
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There's one aspect of Mérimée's weighting of the tale that's perhaps more manipulative than subtle. We never find out who the eldest brother is, Orlanduccio or Vincentello. That fact is in itself of no importance, but the withholding is. These sons of Giudice Barricini are scarcely distinguishable because they are scarcely individualized. That makes it much easier, perhaps a bit too easy, for the reader to tolerate Colomba's viewpoint. The more we know about people, the less easy it is to just sign their death-warrants. We aren't told the brothers' ages, but since Orso regards either brother as a fitting opponent in a duel (XI), it's probable that both brothers are about the same age as Orso. Wouldn't it be likely that men of Orso's age who had remained in Corsica would be married, have young families? And perhaps they do. One of Colomba's fierce statements is that "the man who gets me to leave off my mourning clothes will give the women over there cause to don them" (XI). Who these women are, the story doesn't want us to know.
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There's another thing about this brief conversation between the two inveterate enemies, these old-style Corsicans. Barricini sees Colomba as the person responsible for the death of his sons. And Colomba sees it exactly the same way. Neither are in the slightest doubt that it's she who has brought about this latest wave of killing. (Strikingly, Barricini and Colomba use "tu" to address each other. There's no possibility of Barricini's "you" including anyone other than Colomba herself.)
But you could argue that this is nonsense. Orso, merely by returning to his home village, is immediately in danger, as Colomba well knows. Because obviously the Barricini will see him as coming after them. They'd be likely to ambush him, and if he was lucky enough to survive he'd of course defend himself; just as it all eventually plays out. And in fact if Orso hadn't dismissed the armed retinue that Colomba insisted on, the ambush in which the Barricini brothers die wouldn't even have taken place.
And yet I'm sure every reader will agree with Colomba's assumption of responsibility. It's she who has nurtured the flame of vendetta and who has consistently provoked both sides towards violence. She demonstrates care for her brother, but on the other hand she's more than willing to put his life in danger. Nothing matters more than the family honour.
We aren't told if Colomba was closer to her father than Orso was, but from her perspective it makes no difference. Avenging her father's death is not about who he is as an individual but who he is in terms of a kinship structure: i.e. her father, a della Rebbia. By the same token, Orso's feelings about his father (or lack of them) are irrelevant to her. Orso too doesn't matter as an individual, only as her brother, the head of the family.
Colomba's actions are driven not by what she "knows" but by what is fitting ("We village women think only of what is right"(XIX)). And, like others who feel intensely what is right, she considers herself licensed to use any means necessary to achieve her ends. She's devious, manipulative and dishonest, conceals her doings from her brother, stages scenes for maximum effect, deceives him, the Prefect, Lydia... Her mutilation of Orso's horse, falsely implicating the Barricinis, is the most flagrant instance. Orso and the Nevils show remarkable cosmopolitan tolerance to Colomba's fanaticism, but I wonder how they'd have felt about this act if it ever came out. Colomba, certainly, is lovable and forgiveable, she brings a fire that's life-giving to her more conventional companions. Or (is this the same thing?) she uses them.
At the end, Colomba appears to blithely lay aside her stiletto and her Corsican culture to embark on a new life in Ireland: "I'm not at all the little savage any longer" (XXI). Really? Well, it's possible: a total and permanent change of life such as this can indeed be accompanied by a permanent change of outlook. Colomba's only twenty. Personally, I read the "happy ending" as heavily ironic and fraught with depressingly ugly potential in an unwritten future. Others have felt the pregnancy of that unwritten future too -- Saintsbury wished that Mérimée had written a sequel. It's perhaps in the nature of vendettas that you don't just complete them, you can never just walk away.
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The 1982 Italian TV movie of Colomba, directed by Giacomo Battiato and starring Anne Canovas as Colomba (First episode of three):
I watched the first ten minutes. It's beautifully filmed, and rather fascinating. It begins with Col. della Rebbia's murder and with the obviously underhand response of the Barracinis, which means we start out entirely on Colomba's side in her struggle against injustice. It's a very different experience to the journey on which Mérimée leads us.
(Colomba was also the basis of the disastrous Hollywood movie Vendetta (1950), completed by Mel Ferrer. Howard Hughes kept firing the directors.)
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In a letter Mérimée confided that he had altered the last part of the story, following negative feedback from a lady reader. The original draft had Colomba, still in pursuit of the family honour, entrapping the wealthy heiress Lydia into marrying Orso.
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A misconception I had, while reading Colomba, was that Mérimée was romancing, to the extent that vendettas belonged more to Corsica's dim past than to 1815 (when the story is set), let alone 1840 (date of publication). In fact, as I read in Wikipedia, "Between 1821 and 1852, no less than 4,300 murders were perpetrated in Corsica". And blood feuds are still very much alive in the world today. For instance, "since 1992, at least 10,000 Albanians have been killed in them". In Ireland (especially Dublin and Limerick), "Since 2001, over 300 people have been killed in feuds". In Mindanao (Philippines) blood feuds (rido) combine with a separatist conflict: 120,000 violent deaths in thirty years.
[Regarding the skyrocketing "culture of honor" killings in the Southern United States from the 1840s to the 1870s, Randolph Roth in American Homicide argued (according to Wikipedia) "That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy".]
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Colomba, complete French text:
Colomba in English, translation by The Lady Mary Loyd:
I couldn't find much online writing about Colomba that arrested me, but these two surveys -- though they don't say much about Colomba specifically -- are at least historically interesting:
Mérimée's Letters to an Unknown, with an 1873 introduction to Mérimée by Hippolyte Taine:
George Saintsbury's 1906 introduction to The Writings of Prosper Mérimée:
And here's a more recent essay I enjoyed very much:
Corry Cropper, "Mérimée's Colomba and the July Monarchy" (Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol 29 Nos 1/2 (Fall/Winter 2000/2001):
Corry Cropper argues persuasively that Colomba reflected the kind of difficulties being faced by the July Monarchy, who were trying to please two deeply opposed traditions in France (the Legitimists and the Republicans), and who were seeking stronger ties with Britain at the same time as honouring Napoleon's memory. But you'll understand from what I've written above that I can't really go along with his characterization of Colomba as "benign", "pleasant" and "optimistic", with an untroubling happy ending. My own reading's much more aligned with Nicholas Jotcham's description of the ending as "almost without parallel.. for sheer venom" (Carmen and Other Stories, p. xxiii). However, I have to concede that the untroubled reading does have a long tradition. The reviewer of Colomba in The North American Review (1856) wrote of "the sparkling and graceful story", approvingly adding that "Such tales as 'Colomba' and 'Tolla' may be read without a blush by the most modest woman". (Perhaps that way of thinking about it also lies behind "Ein Mädchenroman aus Korsika".) Saintsbury was jocular about Colomba's "eccentric ideas on the subject of murder", but thinks a man would be a fool not to marry her.
Despite Saintsbury, Mérimée's work hasn't taken a deep hold in English-language culture. Even so, it's bizarre that he's never appeared in the Penguin Classics, particularly considering the Francophilia of their early years, when Maupassant, Balzac, Stendhal and Zola featured so much more prominently than they do nowadays. But Mérimée (and Colomba) were once staples of French language teaching in schools; he's one of the easiest of classic authors to read in French. That's how I encountered him myself, at fifteen, when our class lapped up the Chronique. Now that modern language teaching has almost collapsed in the UK, I suppose this memory will seem rather quaint.
Labels: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Prosper Mérimée, Régis Manset, Specimens of the literature of France
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