Read Jeunesse, suivi de Au cœur des ténèbres in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Jeunesse, suivi de Au cœur des ténèbres by Joseph Conrad was first published in 1902. In Passage you read the full text in the French translation by G. Jean-Aubry and André Ruyters, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 58,400 words.

Two voyages, one storyteller. A young man's first taste of the sea, and a river that leads into darkness.

One quiet evening, the sailor Marlow tells his friends about his first voyage to the East. He is twenty, second mate on the Judea, a battered old barque carrying coal from England to Bangkok. Storms, leaks and worse stand between the ship and the harbour, but nothing can spoil the joy of being young.

Years later, aboard a yawl moored on the Thames, Marlow tells a much darker story: how he took a job steering a steamboat up a great African river for an ivory company, and heard, at every station, the name of a mysterious agent called Kurtz.

Youth, and Heart of Darkness brings together two of Joseph Conrad's finest novellas. Heart of Darkness inspired Apocalypse Now and remains one of the most discussed books of the twentieth century.

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.