Read Extaze in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Extaze by Louis Couperus was first published in 1892. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 31,700 words.

A young widow. A stranger by the fireside. A happiness she never expected.

In a small rose-and-violet salon on the road to Scheveningen, Cecile van Even lives in gentle seclusion. Widowed for a year and a half, mother of two little boys, Dolf and Christie, she reads, dreams and hardly ever goes out — until her brother-in-law persuades her to spend a quiet evening at his home.

There, unexpectedly, she meets his friend Taco Quaerts, a strong, reserved man whose presence stirs something she thought she had left behind for good. What follows is not a story of dramatic events but of feelings: the delicate, almost dreamlike unfolding of a bond between two sensitive souls, and the question of what happiness truly asks of us.

Louis Couperus called it “a book of happiness”. Short, luminous and translated into English the very year it appeared, Extaze is a perfect doorway into the work of the great stylist of The Hague.

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.