Read Chéri in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Chéri by Colette was first published in 1920. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 38,200 words.

She is nearly fifty. He is young and dazzling. Their affair was never meant to last.

In Belle Époque Paris, Léa de Lonval, a rich and elegant courtesan close to retirement, has spent six years with Chéri, the spoilt, beautiful son of her old friend and rival Charlotte Peloux. She has fed him, dressed him, scolded him and taught him almost everything, half lover, half mother.

Now Madame Peloux has arranged a marriage for him with Edmée, a shy, wealthy girl of eighteen. Léa tells herself it hardly matters: Chéri was only ever a pleasant habit, and she will soon find another. But as the wedding approaches, both of them begin to discover what they have refused to admit.

Chéri is Colette's most famous novel, witty, sensual and quietly heartbreaking, a portrait of love and ageing told with a light touch. Stephen Frears filmed it in 2009 with Michelle Pfeiffer as Léa.

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.