French · Advanced
Read L'Assommoir in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Drinking Den
Émile Zola · 1877
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About the book
L'Assommoir by Émile Zola was first published in 1877. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 159,600 words.
A hardworking laundress. A poor Paris neighbourhood. And a bar on the corner that waits for everyone.
Gervaise Macquart is twenty-two, has a slight limp and two little boys, and has just been abandoned in a Paris hotel room by her lover Lantier. She does not give up. She works at the washhouse, keeps her head high and dreams of something simple: bread every day, a clean little home, maybe one day her own laundry shop.
When Coupeau, a cheerful roofer who never touches strong drink, asks her to marry him, life in the working-class Goutte-d'Or district seems to be looking up. But on the corner stands Père Colombe's bar, the Assommoir, with its gleaming still, and the city has a way of pulling people down.
The Drinking Den was Émile Zola's first huge success, a powerful and humane portrait of the Paris poor, written in their own lively street language. It was filmed in 1956 as Gervaise.
- Author
- Émile Zola
- First published
- 1877
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 159,600 words
How it opens
Gervaise avait attendu Lantier jusqu'à deux heures du matin. Puis, toute frissonnante d'être restée en camisole à l'air vif de la fenêtre, elle s'était assoupie, jetée en travers du lit, fiévreuse, les joues trempées de larmes. Depuis huit jours, au sortir du Veau à deux têtes, où ils mangeaient, il l'envoyait se coucher avec les enfants et ne reparaissait que tard dans la nuit, en racontant qu'il cherchait du travail.
Reading L'Assommoir 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 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.
