French · Beginner
Read Contes d'une grand-mère in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Tales of a Grandmother
George Sand · 1873
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Contes d'une grand-mère by George Sand was first published in 1873. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 49,000 words.
Flowers that whisper, a fairy made of dust, and a gentleman who remembers being a dog.
George Sand wrote these tales in her later years for her granddaughters, Aurore and Gabrielle, and a grandmother's warmth, humour and curiosity shine on every page. They mix fairy tale and real life, magic and nature, inviting young readers to look more closely at the world around them.
In "The Dog and the Sacred Flower", a kindly neighbour calmly explains over dinner that he remembers his past life as a dog. In "What the Flowers Say", a little girl finally manages to overhear the garden's secret conversations. "The Titan's Organ" takes an old musician back to a terrifying childhood journey among the volcanoes of Auvergne, and "The Dust Fairy" reveals that a grubby little old woman nobody wants holds the secret of the whole world.
Poetic and wise, these stories show another side of one of France's great novelists.
- Author
- George Sand
- First published
- 1873
- Language
- French
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy
- Length
- About 49,000 words
How it opens
Il y avait autrefois en la forêt de Cernas un gros vieux chêne qui pouvait bien avoir cinq cents ans. La foudre l'avait frappé plusieurs fois, et il avait dû se faire une tête nouvelle, un peu écrasée, mais épaisse et verdoyante.
Longtemps ce chêne avait eu une mauvaise réputation. Les plus vieilles gens du village voisin disaient encore que, dans leur jeunesse, ce chêne parlait et menaçait ceux qui voulaient se reposer sous son ombrage. Ils racontaient que deux voyageurs, y cherchant un abri, avaient été foudroyés.
Reading Contes d'une grand-mère 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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of French and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
