French · Advanced
Read La Chartreuse de Parme in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal · 1839
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal was first published in 1839. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 181,400 words.
A young dreamer runs away to fight for Napoleon. He finds Waterloo, and has no idea what is going on.
Fabrice del Dongo, the handsome younger son of a stiff, reactionary Milanese nobleman, worships Napoleon. Still a teenager, he slips away to join the Emperor and stumbles through the battle of Waterloo, never quite sure whether he has really fought in it.
Back in Italy, he is protected by his dazzling aunt Gina, soon to become the Duchess Sanseverina, and by her admirer Count Mosca, the shrewd prime minister of the tiny court of Parma. There, among plots, suspicious princes and ambitious courtiers, Fabrice's charm and recklessness will lead him into danger, and towards a love he never expected.
Stendhal dictated this masterpiece in under two months. Balzac hailed it as a work of genius, and its Waterloo chapters are among the most famous battle scenes ever written.
- Author
- Stendhal
- First published
- 1839
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 181,400 words
How it opens
Le 15 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fit son entrée dans Milan à la tête de cette jeune armée qui venait de passer le pont de Lodi, et d’apprendre au monde qu’après tant de siècles César et Alexandre avaient un successeur.
Au Moyen Age, les Lombards républicains avaient fait preuve d’une bravoure égale à celle des Français, et ils méritèrent de voir leur ville entièrement rasée par les empereurs d’Allemagne. Depuis qu’ils étaient devenus de fidèles sujets, leur grande affaire était d’imprimer des sonnets sur de petits mouchoirs de taffetas rose quand arrivait le mariage d’une jeune fille appartenant à quelque famille noble ou riche.
Reading La Chartreuse de Parme 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.
