French · Beginner
Read La Maison de Claudine in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: My Mother's House
Colette · 1922
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About the book
La Maison de Claudine by Colette was first published in 1922. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 35,300 words.
A big house, two wild gardens, and a mother calling out: “Where are the children?”
In a village in Burgundy, a little girl grows up in a tall, stern house whose sunny back hides wisteria, walled gardens and endless places to disappear. Her brothers vanish up trees and over walls, her half-sister is weighed down by hair that reaches her knees, and the cats, dogs and even the spiders of the house have personalities of their own.
At the heart of it all is Sido, her mother: practical, funny, fearless, kind to every creature and endlessly curious about the world. Around her pass the one-legged father who retreats to his library, the village priest, neighbours, weddings and small dramas, all seen through a child's sharp, delighted eyes. Standouts include “Where Are the Children?”, “My Mother and the Animals” and “The Little Bouilloux Girl”.
My Mother's House gathers some thirty short, self-contained chapters, Colette's tender tribute to her childhood and her mother, and each one makes a perfect bite-size read.
- Author
- Colette
- First published
- 1922
- Language
- French
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Young Adult
- Length
- About 35,300 words
How it opens
La maison était grande, coiffée d'un grenier haut. La pente raide de la rue obligeait les écuries et les remises, les poulaillers, la buanderie, la laiterie, à se blottir en contre-bas tout autour d'une cour fermée.
Accoudée au mur du jardin, je pouvais gratter du doigt le toit du poulailler. Le Jardin-du-Haut commandait un Jardin-du-Bas, potager resserré et chaud, consacré à l'aubergine et au piment, où l'odeur du feuillage de la tomate se mêlait, en juillet, au parfum de l'abricot mûri sur espaliers. Dans le Jardin-du-Haut, deux sapins jumeaux, un noyer dont l'ombre intolérante tuait les fleurs, des roses, des gazons négligés, une tonnelle disloquée…
Reading La Maison de Claudine 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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of French and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
