On 27 June 1830, as the result of a broken love-affair, Mérimée, aged 27, embarked on a visit to Spain. ‘Les voyages font la jeunesse’, so the French saying goes (‘Travels form your youth’). Certainly, this voyage was to prove crucial: its resonances never left him. As he himself confessed, the final straw was rejection by one Mélanie Double, daughter of a celebrated physician. Mérimée’s attraction to her is documented in letters to Stendhal with whom (among others) he shared intimate details of his sex life. She never married but a chain of letters, now as a confidante, followed. Essentially Dr Double had decided that Mérimée’s financial stability was insufficient for him to marry his daughter. His unluckiness in love, however, turned out to be fortuitous: he admitted that his journey to Spain was ‘the best thing he ever did’. Had he remained in Paris, licking his wounds, we would never have had Bizet’s opera.

Mérimée’s trip turned out to be curative Hispanotherapy, although the Spanish official who had issued his passport had feared that his liberal allegiances, atheism and anti-clericalism might have made his entry into Spain somewhat risky. Just in case, his close friend Stendhal had proposed to Mérimée a Plan B, which was to go to Italy instead. In the end his entry into Spain went smoothly and he soon found himself in the south. Although he visited Spain on several subsequent occasions he was never to visit Andalusia again. This is an important point, since by the time he wrote Carmen he would be drawing upon details of this visit of over ten years before, or else reminding himself of it through reading some of the already-mentioned travelogues. This he certainly did.

Largely by happenstance, he met plenty of like-minded liberals in Spain, not least the Montijo family, to whose children he became known by the pet-name Don Prospero. He had met the brother of the Count of Teba by chance when travelling in a shared diligence, and through this became friends with this famous family, particularly the Count’s wife, Mme de Montijo, with whom he corresponded intimately and frequently, in an entirely Platonic way. Her daughters sat on his lap and loved him. Little was he to know that one of them, Eugénie, would later become Empress of France by marrying Napoleon’s cousin and subsequently settle in England – in Chislehurst, to be precise.