Read L'Île mystérieuse in Frenchwith every sentence explained

L'Île mystérieuse by Jules Verne was first published in 1875. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction and young adult. It runs to about 195,900 words.

Five castaways. One unknown island. And the feeling that someone is watching.

March 1865, during the American Civil War. Five prisoners escape the besieged city of Richmond in a stolen balloon, just as a monstrous storm breaks. Days later they crash onto a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific: the brilliant engineer Cyrus Smith, the journalist Gédéon Spilett, the sailor Pencroff, young Harbert, the loyal Nab and Top the dog.

They have nothing, not even a match. Using science, courage and teamwork, they set out to build a whole new life, from fire and pottery to bricks, iron and even explosives. But strange events keep happening on Lincoln Island, as if a hidden helper were on their side.

The Mysterious Island is one of Jules Verne's greatest adventures, the ultimate survival story, and a much-filmed favourite.

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.