Read La segunda casaca in Spanishwith every sentence explained

La segunda casaca by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1876. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction.

Juan Bragas de Pipaón has always been loyal to the King. As long as loyalty pays.

Madrid, 1819. Pipaón, a smooth court official who has done very nicely out of Ferdinand VII's absolute rule, looks back on those years with shameless good humour. Plots against the throne break out one after another, thirteen of them since 1814, and he lists every one in mock horror while making sure his own bread stays buttered.

His fiercely royalist patron Don Miguel de Baraona has come to court with his beautiful, reserved granddaughter Jenara, and the old man wants just one thing: to see the liberal conspirator Salvador Monsalud, said to be hiding in Madrid, behind bars. As the Inquisition hunts Freemasons and the army grows restless, Pipaón starts to sense which way the wind is blowing, and to wonder whether it is time to change coats.

Part of Galdós's great cycle of National Episodes, The Second Coat (1876) is a sharp, funny portrait of Spain on the eve of the 1820 revolution.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. 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 Spanish 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.