French · Intermediate
Read La Machine à explorer le temps in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Time Machine
H. G. Wells · 1895
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
La Machine à explorer le temps by H. G. Wells was first published in 1895. In Passage you read the full text in the French translation by Henry-D. Davray, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 32,400 words.
A Victorian inventor pulls a lever. When he stops, it is the year 802,701.
One evening in his house in Richmond, a scientist known only as the Time Traveller shows his dinner guests a gleaming little model of a machine, and sends it vanishing into the future. A week later he stumbles in late to dinner, dusty, limping and starving, with an incredible story to tell.
He has travelled hundreds of thousands of years ahead, to a garden-like world where the gentle, childlike Eloi live in idleness among crumbling palaces. It looks like paradise, until his machine disappears and he begins to wonder what moves in the dark beneath their feet.
The Time Machine is the novel that gave the world time travel as we know it. H. G. Wells's short masterpiece has been filmed, copied and reimagined ever since, and it is still a thrilling, unsettling read.
- Author
- H. G. Wells
- First published
- 1895
- Language
- French
- Translated by
- Henry-D. Davray
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Science Fiction, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 32,400 words
How it opens
L’objet que l’Explorateur du Temps tenait à la main était une espèce de mécanique en métal brillant, à peine plus grande qu’une petite horloge, et très délicatement faite. Elle comprenait aussi diverses parties en ivoire et d’autres d’une substance cristalline et transparente.
Il me faut tâcher maintenant d’être extrêmement clair car ce qui suit — à moins que son explication ne soit acceptée est une chose absolument incroyable. Il prit l’une des petites tables octogonales qui se trouvaient dans tous les coins de la pièce et il la plaça devant la cheminée, avec deux de ses pieds sur le devant de foyer. Sur cette table il plaça son mécanisme.
Reading La Machine à explorer le temps 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.
