Carmen

Don José is a soldier of good family, honest and dull, with a career before him - until, in a Seville tobacco-factory, he sets eyes on Carmen: a Gypsy girl, beautiful, laughing, and utterly free, who will belong to no man living. For love of her he deserts, smuggles, and kills; and still she will not be held.Prosper Mérimée told it in 1845 with the cold precision of a man reporting a crime - and thirty years later Georges Bizet made of it the most beloved opera in the world. But the tale itself is harder and darker than any stage: a study of the ruin one free heart can work upon a possessive one. This Lightbound Library edition sets the complete novella in Lady Mary Loyd's translation, with the Greek epigraph Mérimée chose for it, bound behind an original painting.