Read De la Terre à la Lune : trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes in Frenchwith every sentence explained

De la Terre à la Lune : trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes by Jules Verne was first published in 1865. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction.

The Civil War is over, and America’s greatest gunners have nothing left to shoot at.

In Baltimore, the members of the Gun Club, veterans obsessed with ever bigger cannons, are dying of boredom in peacetime. Then their president, Impey Barbicane, makes an astonishing proposal: build a gun powerful enough to fire a projectile all the way to the Moon.

The whole world catches the fever. Astronomers at Cambridge work out the sums, Florida and Texas fight to host the colossal Columbiad, and money pours in from every nation. But Barbicane has a bitter rival in Captain Nicholl, a maker of armour plate, and the scheme grows wilder still when a fearless Frenchman, Michel Ardan, announces that he wants to ride inside the shell.

Published in 1865, Jules Verne’s witty, number-filled adventure imagined space flight with uncanny foresight and helped inspire Georges Méliès’s famous film A Trip to the Moon.

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.