Carmen

The novella that was the basis for perhaps the most popular opera of all time, Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen is the swashbuckling story of a nineteenth-century Spanish soldier who deserts his post to pursue the fiery gypsy beauty, Carmen—who is as brave as she is fickle.

The opera’s plot, it turns out, is based only on part of the larger adventure that is Carmen. The story opens, for example, with the narrator, a historian like Mérimée, researching the lost site of an ancient R…