Read La Vampire in Frenchwith every sentence explained

La Vampire by Paul Féval is a public-domain classic. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under horror.

Paris, 1804. Rich young strangers are vanishing, and the whole city whispers one word: vampire.

Fish are biting in midwinter off the Île Saint-Louis, a tavern keeper named Ezéchiel claims he found a diamond ring, still on a finger, inside one of them, and rumours of a hidden charnel house on the Seine spread from street to street. The police deny everything; they are far busier hunting Georges Cadoudal and his plot against the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Meanwhile René de Kervoz, a young Breton, is drifting away from his gentle fiancée Angèle, spellbound by a mysterious countess newly arrived from Hungary. Angèle's adoptive father, the formidable master mason Jean-Pierre Sévérin, known as Gâteloup, and his protégé Germain Patou, a sharp young medical student, set out to learn who this woman really is.

One of Paul Féval's three vampire novels, The Vampire Countess mixes Gothic terror, political conspiracy and swashbuckling adventure from the author of Le Bossu.

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.