French · Advanced
Read Au Bonheur des Dames in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Ladies' Paradise
Émile Zola · 1883
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola was first published in 1883. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 149,300 words.
A shy girl from the provinces. A dazzling department store. A man who wants to conquer every woman in Paris.
Twenty-year-old Denise Baudu steps off the train in Paris with her two younger brothers and almost nothing in her pockets. Her uncle runs an old draper's shop, but across the street rises a palace of silk, lace and bright windows: The Ladies' Paradise, a vast new store that is swallowing the whole neighbourhood.
Denise finds work there as a salesgirl, and enters a world of fierce rivals, long hours and gossip. Above it all reigns the store's owner, the charming and ambitious Octave Mouret, who has built his empire on women's desires. He hardly notices the quiet new girl, at first.
The Ladies' Paradise is Émile Zola's lively novel about the birth of modern shopping, love and money in nineteenth-century Paris. It inspired the BBC series The Paradise and Italy's hit show Il Paradiso delle Signore.
- Author
- Émile Zola
- First published
- 1883
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 149,300 words
How it opens
Denise était venue à pied de la gare Saint-Lazare, où un train de Cherbourg l'avait débarquée avec ses deux frères, après une nuit passée sur la dure banquette d'un wagon de troisième classe. Elle tenait par la main Pépé, et Jean la suivait, tous les trois brisés du voyage, effarés et perdus, au milieu du vaste Paris, le nez levé sur les maisons, demandant à chaque carrefour la rue de la Michodière, dans laquelle leur oncle Baudu demeurait. Mais, comme elle débouchait enfin sur la place Gaillon, la jeune fille s'arrêta net de surprise.
Reading Au Bonheur des Dames 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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate French book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
