French · Intermediate
Read L'Aiguille creuse in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Hollow Needle
Maurice Leblanc · 1909
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
L'Aiguille creuse by Maurice Leblanc was first published in 1909. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under mystery and crime and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 62,700 words.
A night-time burglary. A schoolboy detective. A secret worthy of the kings of France.
At the château of Ambrumésy in Normandy, a scream wakes the household in the middle of the night. Raymonde de Saint-Véran sees a man escaping across the garden with stolen goods, and fires a shot. Yet when the police arrive, the wounded thief has vanished, and strangely, nothing of value seems to be missing.
The detectives are baffled, but a seventeen-year-old student from Paris, Isidore Beautrelet, is not. Calm, sharp and fearless, he takes on the case, and soon he realises that his opponent is none other than Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief. The trail leads to a mysterious cryptogram and to a legendary hiding place called the Hollow Needle.
The Hollow Needle is one of Maurice Leblanc's most famous Lupin adventures, full of twists, and a key inspiration for the hit Netflix series Lupin.
- Author
- Maurice Leblanc
- First published
- 1909
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Mystery and Crime, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 62,700 words
How it opens
Raymonde prêta l’oreille. De nouveau et par deux fois le bruit se fit entendre, assez net pour qu’on pût le détacher de tous les bruits confus qui formaient le grand silence nocturne, mais si faible qu’elle n’aurait su dire s’il était proche ou lointain, s’il se produisait entre les murs du vaste château, ou dehors, parmi les retraites ténébreuses du parc.
Reading L'Aiguille creuse 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 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.
