Who'd 'a' Thunk It?

While waiting for the Pendulum to sway into office the worst choice of Tweedle-dum (the War Criminal) and Tweedle-dee (the Mor[m]on) that the ineluctable operation of corporate fascism has ever forced on a once free nation--trying to stand away and pretend that a civilized existence is still possible--I went to the beautiful downtown Hawaii State Library a week or so ago, and stuck out a serendipity-seeking hand in the French book section--and Lo!

I had a Classiques Garnier copy of three stories in one volume by Prosper Mérimée:  Colomba, La Vénus de Lille,  Les Ames du Purgatoire.  Incontinent, I began reading them in that order.  At first Colomba piqued, and for a while held, my interest--but as the eponymous Soeur Corse got more and more barbaric and frenzied and manipulative, I wearied of the story and left off reading shortly after the vengeful girl slit the innocent pony's ear--and turned with relief, and mild but unfeigned amusement to the doings of a wicked antique goddess en province.  I wasn't surprised really to learn that Mérimée considered La Vénus de Lille to be his definitive Best Work--and it is, like I say, amusing, and moves along with a du Mauppasant-like concision of significant detail, and an energetic Voltairean snap.  So, chuckling, I plunged into Les Ames du Purgatoire, thinking it might prove entertaining--and did it ever!  Voltaire is, in fact, the only comparison I can think of to describe the clarity, energy, and sparkling wit and corruscating changes of point of view of this wonderful conte.  So then I picked up Colomba and started reading where I'd left off--where the hero, whom up to this moment I'd been thinking of as the pretty but ineffectual tool of his mad half-civilized sister--sets out to meet up with the Englishman and his daughter, and is ambushed by the very people his sister told him were going to ambush him.  The story of which, with the admiring yet rueful apologue of the bandit who comes out of the maquis to look things over and tend to young Orso's wounds and lead him to safety, is the fastest, most enthralling dozen or so pages I've ever read in my life.  So now, starting with Les Ames du Purgatoire, I've begun re-reading.  And it's funny, knowing for sure that I'm not going to be, as it were, detained, how unboring the quintessentially boring exercise of re-reading can be.