French · Advanced
Read L'Immoraliste in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Immoralist
André Gide · 1902
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About the book
L'Immoraliste by André Gide was first published in 1902. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 38,000 words.
A young scholar nearly dies on his honeymoon, and wakes up hungry for life.
Michel has spent his youth buried in books, raised by a learned father and a strict Huguenot mother. At twenty-four, to please his dying father, he marries Marceline, a gentle young woman he hardly knows, and takes her on a honeymoon to North Africa. On the road from Tunis he falls gravely ill with tuberculosis.
In the oasis town of Biskra, slowly recovering in the sun among palm gardens and laughing Arab boys, Michel discovers the pleasure of his own body and senses. Determined to live, he begins to throw off everything he once was, while Marceline watches the man she married turn into a stranger.
Told by Michel himself to three old friends, The Immoralist is one of André Gide's most celebrated short novels. Brief, intense and beautifully written, it asks how far a person may go to be free.
- Author
- André Gide
- First published
- 1902
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 38,000 words
How it opens
Mes chers amis, je vous savais fidèles. A mon appel vous êtes accourus, tout comme j’eusse fait au vôtre. Pourtant voici trois ans que vous ne m’aviez vu. Puisse votre amitié, qui résiste si bien à l’absence, résister aussi bien au récit que je veux vous faire. Car si je vous appelai brusquement, et vous fis voyager jusqu’à ma demeure lointaine, c’est pour vous voir, uniquement, et pour que vous puissiez m’entendre. Je ne veux pas d’autre secours que celui-là : vous parler. Car je suis à tel point de ma vie que je ne peux plus dépasser. Pourtant ce n’est pas lassitude. Mais je ne comprends plus. J’ai besoin…
Reading L'Immoraliste 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.
