Read Infernaliana in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Infernaliana by Charles Nodier was first published in 1822. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under horror.

Bleeding nuns, hungry vampires and pacts with the Devil, to be read by candlelight.

Infernaliana gathers more than thirty short pieces about revenants, spectres, demons and vampires: old legends, travellers' reports, brief anecdotes and full-blown "black tales." In "La Nonne sanglante," young Raymond plans to elope with his beloved Agnès disguised as the ghost who walks the castle of Lindemberg every five years, but the veiled figure who climbs into his carriage is not Agnès. In "Le Vampire Arnold-Paul," a Hungarian village digs up a dead man to stop a wave of deaths, and in "Les Aventures de Thibaud de la Jacquière," a Lyon rake who has sworn his soul to the Devil meets a mysterious veiled lady in the dark.

Some tales are truly chilling, others end with a wink, and the book closes with Voltaire's mocking jokes about vampires.

Published in 1822 under the name of Charles Nodier, a pioneer of French fantastic fiction, it is a cabinet of curiosities for lovers of ghost stories.

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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday French 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.