Prosper Mérimée

Mérimée began his career with two frauds. At twenty-two he published a volume of plays credited to an invented Spanish actress; two years later came a collection of Illyrian folk ballads he had made up entirely, which took in both Pushkin and Mickiewicz, who translated them as genuine.

Then he took a government job and quietly did more for European heritage than almost anyone of his century. As Inspector General of Historical Monuments from 1834, he spent two decades riding around France cataloguing buildings that were being quarried for stone, and got the money to save them: Vézelay, Carcassonne, the Pont du Gard, Saint-Sernin. It was Mérimée who put the young Viollet-le-Duc to work on Notre-Dame de Paris.

Carmen, published in 1845, came from an anecdote told to him in Spain — a story about a soldier ruined by a woman, which he set inside the frame of a travelling archaeologist's notebook. He also translated Pushkin and Gogol and effectively introduced Russian literature to France.

Bizet's opera appeared in 1875, five years after his death, and made his novella immortal under someone else's name.