Read Frankenstein, tome 1 in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Frankenstein, tome 1 by Mary Shelley was first published in 1818. In Passage you read the full text in French, marked advanced and filed under horror and science fiction.

Near the Arctic ice, a ship takes on a half-frozen stranger. His story is colder than the sea around them.

Robert Walton dreams of glory at the North Pole. In letters to his sister in England he describes the voyage north, and then the man his crew rescues from a drifting ice floe: Victor Frankenstein, exhausted, and chasing a shape that has vanished across the ice.

As Victor recovers, he tells Walton his life. A happy childhood in Geneva beside his beloved cousin Elizabeth and his friend Henry Clerval, a passion for forgotten sciences, then years of feverish work at the University of Ingolstadt, ending on one dreary night when he gives life to a body built from dead matter and recoils from what he has made.

This first volume of an early French translation covers Walton's letters and Victor's story up to his anguished return home. Mary Shelley's 1818 novel helped found science fiction and remains the most famous Gothic tale of all.

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.