Excerpt from The Novels, Tales and Letters of Prosper Merimee: A Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX
Prosper Merimee was born at Paris in the year 1803, being the son of, as I suppose, the "Mr. Merrimee" (sic) who served as a kind of patron to Hazlitt in his visit to Paris for the purpose of copying pictures in the Louvre. Merimee received a legal education; but instead of proceeding either to the bar or to the bench, after the habit of French lawyers, he entered the public service. He was for some time attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then to that of Commerce; and finally he obtained the extremely congenial appointment of Inspector of Historic Monuments, in which he did much good work, and in connection with which he took many interesting journeys and produced some valuable monographs. In 1840 he undertook a mission to Spain, in the course of which he made acquaintance with the family of the future Empress Eugenie. This acquaintance had much influence on his future career. In 1844 he became a member of the French Academy. At the time of the somewhat famous Libri affair, he defended Libri, who was his friend, from the charge of abstracting public property from libraries, with such warmth, that he was prosecuted and condemned to fine and imprisonment.
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