French · Advanced
Read La Bête humaine in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Beast Within
Émile Zola · 1890
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
La Bête humaine by Émile Zola was first published in 1890. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under mystery and crime and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 125,600 words.
A murder on a speeding train. A witness with a dark secret of his own.
Roubaud, assistant stationmaster at Le Havre, discovers that his young wife Séverine was abused as a girl by her rich and powerful godfather, Président Grandmorin. Mad with jealousy, he forces her to help him take revenge, in a compartment of the Paris to Le Havre express.
Jacques Lantier, a skilled engine driver who loves his locomotive, La Lison, more than any woman, glimpses the crime from beside the track. But Jacques is haunted by a terrible secret: ever since boyhood, desire has awakened in him an urge to kill. As the investigation begins, Séverine sets out to win his silence.
Part of Émile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle, this railway thriller is a dark, gripping study of passion and violence, famously filmed by Jean Renoir with Jean Gabin in 1938.
- Author
- Émile Zola
- First published
- 1890
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Mystery and Crime, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 125,600 words
How it opens
En entrant dans la chambre, Roubaud posa sur la table le pain d'une livre, le pâté et la bouteille de vin blanc. Mais, le matin, avant de descendre à son poste, la mère Victoire avait dû couvrir le feu de son poêle, d'un tel poussier, que la chaleur était suffocante. Et le sous-chef de gare, ayant ouvert une fenêtre, s'y accouda.
Reading La Bête humaine 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.
