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 Lantern 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 by Jessica von Braun.