Mérimée

Lermontov on Pechorin on Thursday (see 10th April), Mérimée on Carmen on Saturday. On this occasion my eye was caught by a reference to the communal bath of the working women of Cordova, said to be the subject of a famous engraving by Baléchou, after Vernet. Never heard of either, but Professor Google turns it up after a few clicks, to tempt me to buy one from ebay, €20 plus €7 postage, illustration left lifted from ebay.

An impressive feat of image recovery, even if the image in question turns out to be a touch fanciful, not what I would expect to see at Cordova at all. Has it been attributed to the right artists? Temptation resisted.

But in the course of being impressed, I did wonder what the Professor's search algorithm makes of accents. I had thought that it would just strip them out, but a search for 'Baléchou' does not seem to give the same results as one for 'Balechou', so he must do something else, maybe just treating them as two quite different words. Maybe that is what works best in French. Or maybe the geeks involved are strictly anglophone. Or maybe Californian Latinos who do not care for the French.