French · Intermediate
Read Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes
Maurice Leblanc · 1908
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès by Maurice Leblanc was first published in 1908. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under mystery and crime. It runs to about 43,800 words.
The gentleman thief meets the great detective. Only one of them can win.
Paris is baffled. A mathematics teacher's antique desk vanishes along with the lottery ticket hidden inside it, worth a million francs. A blue diamond disappears from the scene of a murder. And wherever Arsène Lupin strikes, a mysterious blonde lady seems to slip away into the night.
When the French police and Inspector Ganimard are left empty-handed, the challenge crosses the Channel. Herlock Sholmès, the cool, relentless English detective, arrives with his loyal friend Wilson, determined to unmask the master of disguise. What follows is a duel of wits, traps and outrageous bluffs, in which each rival admires the other a little too much.
Maurice Leblanc's cheeky answer to Sherlock Holmes turned Lupin into a French legend, and this cat-and-mouse classic is still one of the most fun detective stories ever written.
- Author
- Maurice Leblanc
- First published
- 1908
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Mystery and Crime
- Length
- About 43,800 words
How it opens
Le 8 décembre de l’an dernier, M. Gerbois, professeur de mathématiques au lycée de Versailles, dénicha, dans le fouillis d’un marchand de bric-à-brac, un petit secrétaire en acajou qui lui plut par la multiplicité de ses tiroirs.
— Voilà bien ce qu’il me faut pour l’anniversaire de Suzanne, pensa-t-il.
Reading Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday French feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
