The article is devoted to the study of textual cohesion in short stories by P. Merimee, which is a set of significant relations and is common to all the texts; textual cohesion serves as a means of detecting the interdependence of the content of individual parts. Cohesion does not demonstrate what the text says; it reveals how the text is organized into a semantic whole. The unity of the text space is provided by the interaction of grammatical and lexical means, which also serve for its division into hyperphase unity. This qualitatively new unit is a combination of several sentences, interrelated thematically, semantically and syntactically, which serve for a more complete, in comparison with a single sentence, development of thought. The continuum category is directly related to the notion of space. The very term "continuum" means a continuous formation of something, undivided flow of movement in time and space. This is a certain sequence of facts or events, unfolding in time and space; the unfolding of events is not the same in different types of texts. The continuum of a literary text, as a rule, is based on a violation of the actual sequence of events. The relevance of this article is based on the fact that the present literary material has not been studied completely, it has been analyzed mainly in different works devoted to the study of literature. The main linguistic traits of this kind of narrative text are not systematized. Cohesion means in small prose texts can be classified according to different criteria: traditional-grammatical, logical, associative, figurative, composition-structural, stylistic and rhythmic-forming. Particular attention is paid to the traditional-grammatical features (conjunction and conjunction collocations, for example: en raison de cela, c 'est pourquoi, cependant, puisque, ainsi que), all deictic means, participial clauses, since they also serve as a means of communication between larger segments - hyperphase unity and paragraphs, and in this regard they achieve status of cohesion. In this article, logical means are also analyzed because they can be considered as an intersection of grammatical and textual forms of communication: composition-structural forms are analyzed, the attention is paid, first of all, to the violation of the sequence and logical organization of a message (all kinds by digressions, insertions, temporal or spatial descriptions of phenomena, events and actions that are not directly related to the plot of the story); stylistic forms are analyzed because they reveal the organization of the text, in which the stylistic features are consistently repeated in the hyperphase unity and paragraphs. The study of the texts by P. Merimee, based on the classification of text cohesion means, showed that in these short stories, imaginative cohesion is the most frequent, and the characters represent the abstract image of typical representatives of the French bourgeoisie. In addition, P. Merimee widely uses the means of associative cohesion, he often uses proper nouns and mythological heroes' sayings, legends, famous books, all these means make his works more creative.