Read La Grande Peur dans la montagne in Frenchwith every sentence explained

La Grande Peur dans la montagne by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz was first published in 1926. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under horror and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 52,100 words.

A high mountain pasture no one has used for twenty years. The old men still won't say why.

In a village of the Swiss Alps, the council argues late into the night. Up at Sasseneire there is fine grass enough for seventy cows, but the old men insist that something terrible happened there twenty years ago and that the place must be left alone. The young ones laugh, the vote is taken, and the pasture is reopened.

A small crew takes the herd up for the summer: old Barthélemy, who wears a blessed charm under his shirt, the sly, crooked Clou, a boy of thirteen, and young Joseph, who needs the wages to marry his sweetheart Victorine in the autumn. High above the village, cut off from the world, they settle in for the season. Then the first strange signs appear.

Terror on the Mountain is Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's most famous novel, a gripping tale of alpine dread told in a rough, spoken voice, and a classic of Swiss literature.

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.