Puzzling over Prosper Mérimée

The puzzle about Prosper Mérimée (1803-70) is why he's not read more, outside of France. He wrote Carmen (1845), the source of the opera, which keeps his name around, but I don't know how often that translates into readers. Oxford World’s Classics has kept an edition of his stories in print, so someone is reading it. More people should. Here’s the beginning and ending of the first paragraph of Carmen:

"I had always suspected that the geographers were talking nonsense when they located the site of the Battle of Munda in the territory of the Bastuli-Poeni, near present-day Monda, about two leagues north of Marbella... While waiting for my dissertation to resolve once and for all the geographical problem which is holding all learned Europe in suspense, I want to tell you a little story. It in no way prejudges the fascinating question of the site of the battle of Munda."

The narrator follows this pedantry with a story of love, madness, sex, brutal murders, Gypsies and bandits. So it turns out that Mérimée is funny. I don’t think any of the classical geography made it into Bizet’s Carmen.

Mérimée specialized in the exotic – Gypsies, slave ship revolts, Corsica, Lithuania. Sometimes his stories have supernatural elements, and sometimes just wild people. The two Corsican tales, the novella Colomba (1840) and the tiny “Mateo Falcone” (1829) are both horrible tales of revenge. Walter Pater called “Mateo Falcone” “perhaps the cruelest story in the world.” Pater was a sort of human orchid, so not a trustworthy source, but in this case he is only wrong because he apparently was not aware of certain stories of Heinrich von Kleist. Colomba, though, is completely different. Maybe a sketch is in order.

The Nevils, father and daughter are bored by Rome. The hunting is bad, and the daughter can’t find anything that all of her friends haven’t already seen and sketched.* They by chance make their way to Corsica, which promises exotic hunting and sketching, and the excitement promised by the dashing Lieutenant della Rebbia. It looks like this will be the story of outsiders confronting Romantic Coriscan culture. But there's a bit of a trick – della Rebbia, returning from the Napoleonic Wars, is actually the outsider now. The core of the book is his struggle with his sister Colomba over how to revenge his father’s death.

This story has everything. Shootouts, revenge, romance, a final shocker. It's been filmed many times in France and Italy, as early as 1918, as late as 2005. A puzzle why it's not better known in English.

* "At the Hôtel Beauveau Miss Lydia had a bitter disappointment. She had brought back with her a pretty sketch of the Pelasgic or Cyclopean gate at Segni, which she believed the artists had overlooked. However, on meeting her in Marseilles, Lady Frances Fenwich showed Lydia her album, in which, bewteen a sonnet and a dried flower, the gate in question was to be found, embellished with lavish applications of burnt sienna. Miss Lydia gave the gate at Segni to her chambermaid, and quite lost her esteem for Pelasgic edifices."