French · Advanced
Read Du côté de chez Swann in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Swann's Way
Marcel Proust · 1913
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About the book
Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust was first published in 1913. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 166,200 words.
One bite of a madeleine dipped in tea, and a whole lost world comes flooding back.
A man lying awake at night remembers all the bedrooms of his life, and above all Combray, the little town of his childhood holidays: the agonising wait for his mother's goodnight kiss, his aunt Léonie gossiping from her bed, the hawthorns in bloom, and the two family walks, one towards Swann's house, the other towards the grand Guermantes estate.
At the heart of the book lies "Swann in Love", the story of the elegant Charles Swann and his obsessive, jealous passion for Odette de Crécy, set among the snobs and artists of Parisian salons. And then there is Gilberte, Swann's daughter, who makes the young narrator's heart race.
The first volume of In Search of Lost Time is one of the summits of world literature: dense, dazzling and deeply human. A challenge worth savouring slowly.
- Author
- Marcel Proust
- First published
- 1913
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 166,200 words
How it opens
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m’endors.»
J’appuyais tendrement mes joues contre les belles joues de l’oreiller qui, pleines et fraîches, sont comme les joues de notre enfance. Je frottais une allumette pour regarder ma montre. Bientôt minuit. C’est l’instant où le malade, qui a été obligé de partir en voyage et a dû coucher dans un hôtel inconnu, réveillé par une crise, se réjouit en apercevant sous la porte une raie de jour. Quel bonheur, c’est déjà le matin!
Reading Du côté de chez Swann 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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate French book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
