Read Autour de la Lune in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Autour de la Lune by Jules Verne was first published in 1869. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction.

The great cannon has fired. Now three men are hurtling through space inside an aluminium shell.

Picking up at the very moment the giant Columbiad blasts its projectile out of Florida, Verne's sequel to From the Earth to the Moon follows Barbicane, president of the Baltimore Gun Club, his old rival Captain Nicholl and the irrepressible Frenchman Michel Ardan on a four-day flight to the Moon, with two dogs for company.

Inside their padded capsule they argue, joke, cook breakfast, do their sums and watch the Earth shrink behind them. They even feel the strange lightness Verne imagined long before anyone had been to space. But the void has surprises in store, and soon the travellers have to wonder whether they will ever reach their goal, or ever see home again.

Published in 1870, Around the Moon imagined three men circling the Moon in a capsule launched from Florida, almost a century before Apollo 8 did exactly that.

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.