French · Advanced
Read Eugénie Grandet in Frenchwith every sentence explained
Honoré de Balzac · 1833
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About the book
Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac was first published in 1833. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 63,100 words.
The richest man in town counts every lump of sugar. His daughter has never known love.
In the sleepy provincial town of Saumur, everyone talks about old Grandet, a former cooper who has quietly become a millionaire through wine, land and clever deals. Yet his household lives in a cold, dark house, where he measures out the bread, the candles and even the firewood.
His only daughter, Eugénie, is gentle, devout and twenty-three. Two local families court her for her future fortune. Then one autumn evening, her elegant cousin Charles arrives unexpectedly from Paris, with his perfumes, his gold dressing case and a sealed letter for his uncle. For Eugénie, nothing will ever be the same.
Eugénie Grandet is one of Honoré de Balzac's most famous novels, a sharp study of greed and a moving story of first love. Grandet remains literature's great image of the miser.
- Author
- Honoré de Balzac
- First published
- 1833
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 63,100 words
How it opens
Il se trouve dans certaines provinces des maisons dont la vue inspire une mélancolie égale à celle que provoquent les cloîtres les plus sombres, les landes les plus ternes ou les ruines les plus tristes. Peut-être y a-t-il à la fois dans ces maisons et le silence du cloître et l'aridité des landes et les ossements des ruines. La vie et le mouvement y sont si tranquilles qu'un étranger les croirait inhabitées, s'il ne rencontrait tout à coup le regard pâle et froid d'une personne immobile dont la figure à demi monastique dépasse l'appui de la croisée, au bruit d'un pas inconnu.
Reading Eugénie Grandet 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.
