Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée (28 September 1803 — 23 September 1870) was an internationally popular master of French prose, as well as archaeologist, historian, translator, senator, and courtier.

Quotes

• I would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles.
  • A Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX, translated and edited by Prof. George Saintsbury (1906), page v

Quotes about Prosper Mérimée

• Some good judges assert that his is the best French prose that can be found. Hugo's anagram, première prose, is apt and felicitous.
• Mérimée hated effects and pretense; he had no mercy for writers who strove to bring together words which were surprised to find themselves in the same company, who tried to polish their periods to give weird turns to trifling thoughts merely for the effect.
  • Edward Manley, "Prosper Mérimée—Biography" in: Prosper Mérimée. Carmen: and other stories (a French language edition for American schools, 1907), page xvi^{external link}

• When the youthful Queen Victoria was in Paris in 1840, she said to the Queen of France, whose guest she was, 'Do you find my French accent bad?' The Queen made a polite reply, but the King, Louis-Philippe, said to Victoria playfully, 'My dear child, they say that we here in the Tuileries do not speak very good French either. Let us send for Prosper Mérimée...
  • Edward Manley, "Prosper Mérimée—Biography" in: Prosper Mérimée. Carmen: and other stories (a French language edition for American schools, 1907), page xvii^{external link}

• the perverted picture as seen in opera and drama may not become our permanent impression of Mérimée's Carmen. Stage versions and adaptations minimize the misery, squalor, and tragedy of the gypsy girl's life and thereby lose the tremendous force of Mérimée's story. To know both may be good, but to mistake one for the other is not. As one critic has said, "Mérimée's Carmen is a gentleman's Carmen."
  • Edward Manley, "Preface" in: Prosper Mérimée. Carmen: and other stories (a French language edition for American schools, 1907), page vii^{external link}