French · Intermediate
Read La Dame aux camélias in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Lady of the Camellias
Alexandre Dumas fils · 1848
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About the book
La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils was first published in 1848. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 63,500 words.
The most admired woman in Paris has died young. One man cannot let her go.
The narrator wanders into an auction in an elegant Paris apartment. Its owner, Marguerite Gautier, was a famous courtesan who always carried camellias, and she has just died, alone and in debt. On impulse he buys one of her books, a copy of Manon Lescaut with a handwritten dedication from a certain Armand.
A few days later, the young man Armand Duval appears at his door, pale with grief, and asks to see the book. Then he begins to tell his story: how he fell in love with the dazzling, fragile Marguerite, how she let herself love him in return, and how they dreamed of escaping the expensive glitter of Paris together.
The Lady of the Camellias is the great romantic novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, the inspiration for Verdi's opera La Traviata and for Greta Garbo's film Camille.
- Author
- Alexandre Dumas fils
- First published
- 1848
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance
- Length
- About 63,500 words
How it opens
Mon avis est qu'on ne peut créer des personnages que lorsque l'on a beaucoup étudié les hommes, comme on ne peut parler une langue qu'à la condition de l'avoir sérieusement apprise.
N'ayant pas encore l'âge où l'on invente, je me contente de raconter.
J'engage donc le lecteur à être convaincu de la réalité de cette histoire, dont tous les personnages, à l'exception de l'héroïne, vivent encore.
Reading La Dame aux camélias 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 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.
