Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In the autumn of 1830 a French scholar, travelling in Andalusia in search of a lost Roman battlefield, falls into company first with a hunted bandit — the grave, handsome Don José — and later, in Córdova, with a bewitching gypsy girl who tells his fortune by the river. Only afterwards, visiting José in the condemned cell, does he learn how these two strangers were bound together, and hear from the outlaw's own lips the whole story of his ruin. Her name was Carmen.

Carmen is a cigarette-girl of Seville and a gypsy — beautiful, fearless, superstitious, and free as the wind, ruled by no man and no law but her own will. Don José, an honest Basque soldier of good family, throws away his rank, his freedom and at last his soul for love of her: deserter, smuggler, murderer, and in the end, consumed by a jealousy she will never bow to, something worse. For Carmen would sooner die than live unfree.

Published in 1845 by Prosper Mérimée, Carmen is one of the most perfect and passionate short tales in all of French literature — the story that, forty years later, Bizet turned into the world's most beloved opera. It is a tale of Spain in its heat and colour: Seville and Córdova, the tobacco factory, the smugglers' sierra, the bull-ring, and a love that burns everything it touches.

This illustrated edition opens the tale into a gallery of plates — the cast and their portraits, the map of Carmen's Andalusia and its places, the great scenes, and six movement plates you unlock as you read, each drawing the story so far together without revealing what waits ahead. Turn the page, and step into the Spanish sun.