French · Intermediate
Read Claudine à Paris in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Claudine in Paris
Colette · 1901
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About the book
Claudine à Paris by Colette was first published in 1901. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance and young adult. It runs to about 56,000 words.
Claudine trades her beloved village for Paris. Paris has no idea what is coming.
Seventeen and homesick, Claudine has followed her absent-minded father, their servant Mélie and her cat Fanchette from Montigny to a gloomy flat in the rue Jacob. The move knocks her flat: she falls seriously ill, Mélie has to crop her long curls, and she misses the woods and fields of home with all her heart.
Once she recovers, Paris slowly opens up. She meets her aunt Wilhelmine, the gushing Madame Cœur, and her pretty, sharp-tongued grandson Marcel, who is far more interested in his schoolfriends than in girls. Then comes Marcel's father, Renaud, a charming man of the world who seems to understand Claudine better than anyone. And an old schoolmate from Montigny turns up with a scandalous new life.
Claudine in Paris is the lively, mischievous sequel to Claudine at School, written as a diary by the young Colette.
- Author
- Colette
- First published
- 1901
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance, Young Adult
- Length
- About 56,000 words
How it opens
Aujourd’hui, je recommence à tenir mon journal, forcément interrompu pendant ma maladie, ma grosse maladie, — car je crois vraiment que j’ai été très malade !
Je ne me sens pas encore trop solide à présent, mais la période de fièvre et de grand désespoir m’a l’air passée. Bien sûr, je ne conçois pas que des gens vivent à Paris pour leur plaisir, sans qu’on les y force, non, mais je commence à comprendre qu’on puisse s’intéresser à ce qui se passe dans ces grandes boîtes à six étages.
Reading Claudine à Paris 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.
