La Double Méprise Reading Order

La Double Méprise (The Double Misunderstanding, 1833) by Prosper Mérimée is one of his most polished short novels — a story of desire, error, and the impossibility of love in bourgeois society. Julie de Chaverny, unhappily married to a boor who neglects her, is traveling by coach when she meets the elegant Darcy, a diplomat she knew as a young girl. Over the course of the journey, Darcy pursues her, she succumbs to desire in a moment of weakness, and the narrative reveals the multiple misunderstandings on both sides: Darcy believes himself to be in a planned, conscious assignation, while Julie has acted from a momentary passion she immediately regrets. Mérimée's characteristic method — a cold, ironic narrative voice that refuses sentimentality and moral judgment, a compression that puts everything essential into the visible behavior of the characters without explaining it, and an ending that is cruel without being melodramatic — is displayed here at its most economical. La Double Méprise belongs to the same tradition as Stendhal's psychological analyses of love and desire, but where Stendhal is always interested in the theory of crystallization and the inner life of the passionate man, Mérimée is interested in the social surface and the gap between what people intend and what they do.