Read La Mare au diable in Frenchwith every sentence explained

La Mare au diable by George Sand was first published in 1846. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 36,700 words.

A lonely widower, a young shepherdess, and one long night lost in the fog.

Germain is a good-hearted farm labourer in the Berry countryside, a widower of twenty-eight with three small children. His father-in-law urges him to marry again and suggests a well-off widow in a village a few hours away. Reluctantly, Germain saddles his grey mare and sets off to meet her.

On the road he agrees to take along little Marie, a poor sixteen-year-old neighbour going into service at a distant farm, and then discovers that his mischievous son Petit-Pierre has hidden in the bushes to follow them. As night and mist close in, the three travellers lose their way near a gloomy pond with a sinister name, and Germain begins to see Marie with new eyes.

George Sand's tender pastoral novel celebrates peasant life and simple love, and has charmed generations of French schoolchildren.

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.