French · Intermediate
Read La Maternelle in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Nursery School
Léon Frapié · 1904
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About the book
La Maternelle by Léon Frapié was first published in 1904. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 68,100 words.
A young lady with a head full of diplomas takes a job scrubbing floors in a Paris nursery school.
Rose was brought up as a young lady of good family, and she studied hard. Then she lost her dowry, and her elegant fiancé promptly left her. Determined to earn her own bread, she takes the humblest post she can find: cleaning woman at a state nursery school in Ménilmontant, one of the poorest districts of Paris, for eighty francs a month.
From six in the morning she lights the stoves, wipes noses, serves the soup and scrubs the classrooms. Around her swarm some two hundred children aged two to seven, ragged, hungry, funny and heartbreaking, and Rose, who expected nothing but drudgery, begins to see them with new eyes.
Told in Rose's sharp, tender voice, The Nursery School won the Prix Goncourt in 1904 and was filmed three times. It is a moving portrait of childhood and poverty in Belle Époque Paris.
- Author
- Léon Frapié
- First published
- 1904
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 68,100 words
How it opens
L'école est dans une rue pauvre d'un quartier pauvre, assez différent d'un quartier ouvrier proprement dit.
Voici le paysage : les ruisseaux ont une maladie noire ; la chaussée, de la largeur de deux fiacres, sue gras quand elle n'est pas noyée par la pluie ; les trottoirs, trop peu respectés des chiens, des enfants et des ivrognes, abondent en épluchures traîtresses.
Reading La Maternelle 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.
