French · Intermediate
Read Claudine à l'école in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Claudine at School
Colette · 1900
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Claudine à l'école by Colette was first published in 1900. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance and young adult. It runs to about 78,100 words.
Fifteen, cheeky and fiercely clever: Claudine sees everything, and tells it all.
Claudine lives in Montigny, a little village in Burgundy surrounded by the deep woods she adores. Her absent-minded father cares more about his collection of slugs than about her, so she runs wild and spends her days at the village school, which she is about to leave after one last year and her final exams.
A new assistant teacher arrives, the pretty and gentle Aimée Lanthenay, and Claudine is instantly charmed. But the headmistress, the jealous Mademoiselle Sergent, has her own designs on Aimée, and a sly war begins between the girl and the woman. Between classmates' gossip, a flirtatious school inspector and scandalous goings-on behind the classroom doors, nothing escapes Claudine's sharp eyes and sharper tongue.
Colette's first novel, written as a diary, was a sensation in 1900 and launched one of France's greatest writers.
- Author
- Colette
- First published
- 1900
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance, Young Adult
- Length
- About 78,100 words
How it opens
Je m’appelle Claudine, j’habite Montigny ; j’y suis née en 1884 ; probablement je n’y mourrai pas.
Mon Manuel de géographie départementale s’exprime ainsi : « Montigny-en-Fresnois, jolie petite ville de 1950 habitants, construite en amphithéâtre sur la Thaize ; on y admire une tour sarrasine bien conservée… » Moi, ça ne me dit rien du tout, ces descriptions-là ! D’abord, il n’y a pas de Thaize ; je sais bien qu’elle est censée traverser des prés au-dessous du passage à niveau ; mais en aucune saison vous n’y trouveriez de quoi laver les pattes d’un moineau. Montigny construit « en amphithéâtre » ?
Reading Claudine à l'école 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.
