French · Beginner
Read Esclave… ou reine ? in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Slave or Queen?
Delly · 1910
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Esclave… ou reine ? by Delly was first published in 1910. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under romance. It runs to about 39,000 words.
She is not yet sixteen. He wants a wife who will obey him in everything.
Lise de Subrans lives quietly in an old manor house in the Périgord with her cold but devoted stepmother, and often prays at the grave of Gabriel, the saintly childhood friend who shaped her soul. Then, at a stag hunt, she meets her cousin Prince Serge Ormanoff: immensely rich, brilliant, handsome, and said to have no heart at all.
Lise looks exactly like Olga, the prince's late wife, and Serge decides on the spot to marry her and mould her to his will. Her stepmother, bound to him by a mysterious secret, dares not refuse. Swept into a world of palaces and luxury, Lise must find out whether she will be the prince's slave, or the queen of his heart.
Slave or Queen? is the most famous novel by Delly, the pen name of a brother and sister who were France's best-selling romance writers for decades. Pure, page-turning melodrama.
- Author
- Delly
- First published
- 1910
- Language
- French
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Romance
- Length
- About 39,000 words
How it opens
Chassés par un vent du sud-ouest humide et tiède, les nuages couraient sur l'azur pâle en voilant à tout instant le soleil de novembre qui commençait à décliner. En ces moments-là, l'obscurité se faisait presque complète dans le petit cimetière bizarrement resserré entre l'église et le presbytère, deux constructions aussi vénérables, aussi croulantes l'une que l'autre. Le feuilles mortes exécutaient une danse folle dans les allées et sur les tombes, les saules agitaient leurs maigres branches dépouillées, les couronnes de perles cliquetaient contre les grilles dépeintes, le vent sifflait et gémissait, tel qu'une plainte de trépassé…
Reading Esclave… ou reine ? 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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of French and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
