French · Intermediate
Read Carmen in Frenchwith every sentence explained
Prosper Mérimée · 1845
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Carmen by Prosper Mérimée was first published in 1845. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 21,400 words.
She is wild, free and dangerous. He will give up everything for her.
A French scholar travelling through Andalusia in search of an ancient battlefield shares his cigars with a hunted bandit, then meets a strange, dark-eyed young woman in the streets of Córdoba. Later, he will hear the whole story in a prison cell, from the lips of the bandit himself, Don José.
Once a proud young soldier from the Basque country, José was posted in Seville and ordered to arrest a gypsy girl from the tobacco factory after a knife fight. Her name was Carmen. One smile, one promise, and his career, his honour and his peace of mind began to slip away, into a world of smugglers, jealousy and knives.
Prosper Mérimée's short, fierce novella inspired Bizet's opera, one of the most performed in the world, and gave literature one of its most unforgettable heroines.
- Author
- Prosper Mérimée
- First published
- 1845
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 21,400 words
How it opens
J’avais toujours soupçonné les géographes de ne savoir ce qu’ils disent lorsqu’ils placent le champ de bataille de Munda dans le pays des Bastuli-Pœni, près de la moderne Monda, à quelque deux lieues au nord de Marbella. D’après mes propres conjectures sur le texte de l’anonyme, auteur du Bellum Hispaniense, et quelques renseignements recueillis dans l’excellente bibliothèque du duc d’Ossuna, je pensais qu’il fallait chercher aux environs de Montilla le lieu mémorable où, pour la dernière fois, César joua quitte ou double contre les champions de la république.
Reading Carmen 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.
