The Dictation of Merimee - a French Grammar Game with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget - Ruth Pennington Paget
I first saw a framed copy of the Dictation of Mérimée created by Prosper Mérimée (1803 – 1870) in the home of my husband’s grandparents.
I knew that this had to be a dictation after years of doing grueling Friday dictation exercises in my high school. My French teacher would read a passage for half an hour that we students would write. Then, we would pass our papers to the student behind us and correct the dictation exercise. I credit dictation exercises for my command of French grammar.
French is full of traps related to homonyms. The sound “oh” can be written as “o,”, “ô,” “eau,” “ault,”, “eaux,” “au,” “aux,”, and “ot.”
You have to know your vocabulary words and be analytical about applying grammatical rules. In French class, dictation correction time solidified correct usage in our young minds. We all wanted perfect scores to show how polished our French was.
As we students advanced through high school, our French teacher gave us dictation exercises from works such as Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince and Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô. (Salammbô takes place in Carthage in the 3rd century BCE after the First Punic War.) These dictations were somewhat easier for us, because we were reading these books in our French class.
So, when I saw this framed dictation about a dinner in Saint-Adresse near Le Havre, I knew I had to ask my husband’s grandmother a question, “Is this a famous dictation?”
She laughed and said, “It is infamous. It is the Dictée de Mérimée. Napoleon III had trouble with it, but the Austrian ambassador to France only made three mistakes on it.”
The Austrian ambassador was the Prince de Metternich. The dictée that Mérimée created in 1857 was part of the entertainment at the court of Napoleon III in Compiègne, France. The Empress Eugénie made 62 mistakes and Napoleon III made 75 mistakes.
Dictations have remained a part of French culture and not just in school. I was surprised to learn when visiting one of the great-aunts in my husband’s family that she attended a weekly dictation club where she and her friends took turns choosing and reading the dictations that others wrote.
Sometimes they chose passages from French literature, but mostly they made the passages up themselves. (No doubt the made-up passages were full of exceptions to the rules.)
After that discussion, I felt like going home and reviewing French grammar books like Le Petit Bescherelle and taking advantage of the many dictations that are now available on the web. I always liked my French teacher’s dictations that required etymological knowledge in addition to analytical ability.
My family’s copy of the Dictée de Mérimée written on parchment is in a frame on a wall in our home in Germany (now Monterey County California).
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
 |
| Ruth Paget Selfie |
