French · Intermediate
Read Bel-Ami in Frenchwith every sentence explained
Guy de Maupassant · 1885
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant was first published in 1885. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 109,600 words.
Handsome, broke and hungry for more. Paris is about to learn his name.
Georges Duroy, a former soldier back from Algeria, wanders the boulevards of 1880s Paris with three francs in his pocket and a fine moustache. Then he runs into an old army friend, Charles Forestier, now a journalist at the newspaper La Vie Française, who offers him a way in.
Duroy cannot write, but he learns fast, and he discovers that women find him irresistible. With the help of the clever Madeleine Forestier, the playful Clotilde de Marelle and others, he begins to climb, one salon and one newspaper column at a time. Talent matters little; charm and nerve are everything.
Bel-Ami is Guy de Maupassant's sharp, witty portrait of ambition, the press and money in the Belle Époque, and it has been adapted for film several times, most recently with Robert Pattinson.
- Author
- Guy de Maupassant
- First published
- 1885
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 109,600 words
How it opens
Quand la caissière lui eut rendu la monnaie de sa pièce de cent sous, Georges Duroy sortit du restaurant.
Comme il portait beau, par nature et par pose d’ancien sous-officier, il cambra sa taille, frisa sa moustache d’un geste militaire et familier, et jeta sur les dîneurs attardés un regard rapide et circulaire, un de ces regards de joli garçon, qui s’étendent comme des coups d’épervier.
Reading Bel-Ami 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.
