Read La Vagabonde in Frenchwith every sentence explained

La Vagabonde by Colette was first published in 1910. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 59,300 words.

Thirty-three, divorced, and dancing for a living. Renée has sworn off love for good.

Renée Néré was once a novelist and the wife of Adolphe Taillandy, a fashionable painter who cheated on her for years. Now, three years after leaving him, she earns her own living as a dancer and mime in the music halls of Paris, sharing chilly dressing rooms with acrobats and singers and going home to her little dog Fossette. Her life is hard, but it belongs to her.

Then a tall, idle and well-off admirer, Maxime Dufferein-Chautel, begins to turn up night after night, and refuses to be discouraged. As a long tour of France draws near, Renée must choose between the comfort of being loved again and the freedom she has fought so hard to win.

The Vagabond is one of Colette's finest novels, drawn from her own years on the stage, and it was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt in 1910.

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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate French 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.