At midday outside the Seville tobacco factory, young men gather to watch the cigarette girls emerge, clamoring for Carmen. Eyes fixed on Corporal Don José—the only man ignoring her while he repairs his rifle chain—Carmen sings her manifesto of untamable love ('L'amour est un oiseau rebelle') and flings a red cassia flower right between his eyes. Arrested moments later for slashing another worker in a knife fight, Carmen is left in Don José's custody; she seduces him with the Seguidilla ('Près des remparts de Séville') until he loosens her ropes and lets her escape. Two months later at Lillas Pastia's tavern, the famous bullfighter Escamillo arrives to a torchlit ovation and sings of the thrill of the bullring and the dark eyes awaiting his victory ('Votre toast... Toréador, en garde!'). After the crowd leaves, Don José arrives—just released from a month in military prison for letting Carmen escape. When Carmen mocks him for wanting to return to his barracks at the sound of the bugle retreat, Don José pulls out the dried cassia flower she threw at him in Act I and pours out his soul ('La fleur que tu m'avais jetée'). In the smugglers' mountain camp (Act III), Carmen has grown weary of Don José's suffocating jealousy; reading the tarot cards with her friends Frasquita and Mercédès, she turns up Diamonds and Spades—Death ('La mort! Moi d'abord, ensuite lui'). In Act IV, Carmen arrives at the Seville bullring on Escamillo's arm, dressed like a queen. Warned that Don José is lurking in the crowd with a knife, she stays outside to confront him alone ('C'est toi! — C'est moi!'). Declaring 'Carmen will never yield! Free she was born and free she will die!', she pulls Don José's ring from her finger and hurls it at his feet; he stabs her to death just as the crowd inside cheers Escamillo's victory.