Violence in literature is not only found in the depiction of anger, blood, and death but also in less obvious areas of the text. And if it is true that there is a great deal of explicit violence in Mérimée's short stories, there is also, in a rather subtle way, an implicit type of violence derived not from the actions in the text but from the way in which the actions are depicted. The implicit and explicit violence in Mérimée's tales are complementary and necessary.

Theophil Spoerri remarks that "all his tales reek of blood and, at the decisive moment, reach their outcome in death." He goes on to say that "even when in later stories he diverted the conclusion to a happy ending a nightmarish atmosphere still remains primitive passion, the vendetta, the sadism of the werewolf, gypsy loves and gypsy hates, belied in fatality -- these are the driving urges in the best tales." ¹ Spoerri refers to the violence of the events represented that belongs to the action of the story and that will be referred to as diegetic to distinguish it from another type that is a result of narrative strategy, if not the strategy itself, and that Ross Chambers calls narrative violence. Indeed, no matter how atrocious some of the events told in Mérimée's work, it seems that it is not the violence of the actions and characters of his short stories alone that creates the atmosphere of his work, but also the violence embedded in the narrative itself.

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¹ Theophil Spoerri. "Merimée and the Short Story." Yale French Studies 4.2 (1949), 8.