French · Intermediate
Read Colomba in Frenchwith every sentence explained
Prosper Mérimée · 1840
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About the book
Colomba by Prosper Mérimée was first published in 1840. 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 46,300 words.
On Corsica, a debt of blood is never forgotten.
After Waterloo, young lieutenant Orso della Rebbia sails home to Corsica. On board are an English colonel and his elegant, rather bored daughter Lydia, who longs for something truly picturesque. She is about to get far more than she bargained for.
Orso's father was murdered, and the whole island believes the rival Barricini family is to blame. Waiting for him on the shore is his sister Colomba: proud, passionate, famous for her funeral laments, and utterly determined that her brother will take revenge. Torn between the civilised man he has become and the Corsican code of honour, Orso will have to choose.
Prosper Mérimée's swift, sunlit tale of vendetta was a 19th-century bestseller and a long-time favourite in French classrooms, as gripping as a thriller and full of wild island landscapes.
- Author
- Prosper Mérimée
- First published
- 1840
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 46,300 words
How it opens
Dans les premiers jours du mois d'octobre 181., le colonel Sir Thomas Nevil, Irlandais, officier distingué de l'armée anglaise, descendit avec sa fille à l'hôtel Beauvau, à Marseille, au retour d'un voyage en Italie. L'admiration continue des voyageurs enthousiastes a produit une réaction, et, pour se singulariser, beaucoup de touristes aujourd'hui prennent pour devise le nil admirari d'Horace. C'est à cette classe de voyageurs mécontents qu'appartenait miss Lydia, fille unique du colonel. La Transfiguration lui avait paru médiocre, le Vésuve en éruption à peine supérieur aux cheminées des usines de Birmingham. En somme, sa grande objection contre l'Italie était que ce pays manquait de couleur locale, de caractère.
Reading Colomba 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.
