Read El escándalo in Spanishwith every sentence explained

El escándalo by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was first published in 1875. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under romance and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 94,500 words.

A desperate young aristocrat knocks on a Jesuit's door to make a confession.

Madrid, Carnival Monday, 1861. While masked revellers jeer at him in the streets, Fabián Conde, handsome, rich and notorious for his love affairs, goes in search of Father Manrique, an old and wise Jesuit. He is on the edge of ruin: a scandal is about to destroy his honour, his friendships and his one real hope of happiness: his pure love for the young Gabriela.

To explain how he came to this point, Fabián tells his whole story: the disgrace that fell on his father, the reckless pleasures of his youth, and his ties to two very different friends, the passionate Diego and the silent, mysterious Lázaro. Father Manrique listens, and then must give him the hardest advice of all.

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's best-selling novel caused a storm in its day with its battle between conscience and reputation. Gripping and dramatic, it was adapted for the cinema in 1943.

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