Born 1803, the son of a painter, at first tried his hand at drawing, but turned to law and became a public minister eventually, Minister of Marines, then Commerce and Public Works. Best known today for the novel Carmen, which Bizet adapted for the opera stage. He died in 1870 after the Paris Commune.
Moved at the highest levels of society in Paris and abroad, was a lover of Georges Sand, friend of Thiers, Delacroix, Turgenev and Eugenie de Montijo, wife of Napolean III.

Goldschmidt can take some satisfaction in knowing that the Goncourt's give a very unsympathetic character portrait of Merimée in their Journal for 1 Nov 1865:

...there is something indescribably offensive to ordinary, healthy people in this dry, malicious irony, carefully elaborated in order to impress and subjugate women and weak men.