the mouth of a young man in the presence of the corpse of his father
deceased in the course of nature--a young man meant to be
commonplace. "Ah! Would thou hadst died malamorte--by violence! We
might have avenged thee!"

In Colomba, Merimee's best known creation, it is united to a
singularly wholesome type of personal beauty, a natural grace of
manner which is irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting
every circumstance to its design; and presents itself as a kind of
genius, allied to fatal disease of mind. The interest of Merimee's
book is that it allows us to watch the action of this malignant power
on Colomba's brother, Orso della Robbia, as it discovers, rouses,
concentrates to the leaping-point, in the somewhat weakly diffused
nature of the youth, the dormant elements of a dark humour akin to
her own. Two years after his father's murder, presumably at the
instigation of his ancestral enemies, the young lieutenant is
returning home in the company of two humorously conventional English
people, himself now half Parisianised, with an immense natural
cheerfulness, and willing to believe an account of the crime which
relieves those hated Barricini of all complicity in its guilt. But
from the first, Colomba, with "voice soft and musical," is at his
side, gathering every accident and echo and circumstance, the very
lightest circumstance, [25] into the chain of necessity which draws
him to the action every one at home expects of him as the head of his
race. He is not unaware. Her very silence on the matter speaks so
plainly. "You are forming me!" he admits. "Well! 'Hot shot, or cold
steel!'--you see I have not forgotten my Corsican." More and more,
as he goes on his way with her, he finds himself accessible to the
damning thoughts he has so long combated. In horror, he tries to
disperse them by the memory of his comrades in the regiment, the