Carmen

A Basque soldier meets a Gypsy woman outside a cigarette factory in Seville, lets her go, and loses everything by degrees: rank, freedom, and the ability to imagine a life without her. Mérimée's novella is drier and crueller than the opera Bizet made of it, and its narrator is an archaeologist who keeps mistaking the story for a curiosity. Sixty plates of Spanish roads, masked men, night brawls and prison cells by Goya and Barrón y Carrillo carry the heat and menace of the tale across a century of painting.