Read De loteling in Dutchwith every sentence explained

De loteling by Hendrik Conscience was first published in 1850. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 27,700 words.

A Flemish village, a lottery of fate, and a love that must survive the years apart.

Near the woods of Zoersel in the Flemish Kempen, two poor widows and their children live side by side in two clay cottages, sharing everything as if they were one family: their work, their bread, their ox and their cow. Young Jan and his neighbour Trien have grown up together, and without ever saying a word about it, they love each other with all their hearts.

Then the state comes to claim its “tax of blood”. Jan is drawn in the conscription lottery and must leave for years of army service far away. The whole household walks him to the linden tree by the crossroads to say goodbye. Back home, Trien teaches herself to write again, so she can send him a letter — but news from Jan is rare.

Hendrik Conscience's The Conscript (1850) is a short, heartfelt village tale, a classic of Flemish school reading about simple love and loyalty.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. 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 Dutch 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.