Read La Symphonie pastorale in Frenchwith every sentence explained

La Symphonie pastorale by André Gide was first published in 1919. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 19,800 words.

A blind orphan girl. A pastor who opens the world to her. A love he dares not name.

Snowed in at La Brévine, high in the Swiss Jura, a Protestant pastor begins a notebook to tell how Gertrude came into his life. Two and a half years earlier, called to the bedside of a dying old woman, he found her blind niece huddled in the hearth, dirty, silent and almost wild, and took her home in his carriage.

His wife Amélie is far from pleased to have one more mouth to feed. But the pastor devotes himself to Gertrude and, with the help of his friend Dr Martins, slowly draws her out of the dark, teaching her words, colours and music. As she grows into a lovely young woman, his diary begins to reveal more about him than he understands.

The Pastoral Symphony is André Gide's best-loved short novel, simple in style and deep in feeling, and a classic first step into French literature.

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.