French · Intermediate
Read Croc-Blanc in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: White Fang
Jack London · 1923
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Croc-Blanc by Jack London was first published in 1923. In Passage you read the full text in the French translation by Paul Gruyer & Louis Postif, marked intermediate and filed under children and young adult. It runs to about 59,800 words.
Born in the frozen wild, part wolf, part dog: to survive, he must learn the law of the North.
In the icy silence of the Yukon, two men and their sled dogs are hunted day and night by a starving wolf pack, led by a strange she-wolf. Not long after, in a cave above a frozen stream, she gives birth to a litter of cubs. Only one, a grey cub, survives the famine.
The cub learns fast: eat or be eaten. When he stumbles into a Native camp, he meets the strange, all-powerful creatures called humans, and his new master, Grey Beaver, gives him a name: White Fang. Between the cruelty of men and the hostility of the other dogs, he grows into a fearsome fighter. But will he ever learn to trust?
Jack London's companion to The Call of the Wild follows the opposite path, from wilderness to civilisation. Here it is in the classic French translation by Paul Gruyer and Louis Postif.
- Author
- Jack London
- First published
- 1923
- Language
- French
- Translated by
- Paul Gruyer & Louis Postif
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Children, Young Adult
- Length
- About 59,800 words
How it opens
De chaque côté du fleuve glacé, l'immense forêt de sapins s'allongeait, sombre et comme menaçante. Les arbres, débarrassés par un vent récent de leur blanc manteau de givre, semblaient s'accouder les uns sur les autres, noirs et fatidiques, dans le jour qui pâlissait. La terre n'était qu'une désolation infinie et sans vie, où rien ne bougeait, et elle était si froide, si abandonnée que la pensée s'enfuyait, devant elle, au delà même de la tristesse.
Reading Croc-Blanc 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.
