French · Advanced
Read La Vie d'un simple in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Life of a Simple Man
Émile Guillaumin · 1904
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About the book
La Vie d'un simple by Émile Guillaumin was first published in 1904. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 73,600 words.
An old French peasant tells the story of his whole life, plainly and honestly, as no one had before.
Étienne Bertin, known to everyone as Tiennon, was born in 1823 on a sharecropping farm near Bourbon-l'Archambault, in the heart of France. When he is nearly five, his family piles its furniture onto an ox cart and moves to a new farm on the edge of the forest. There he herds sheep with his sister Catherine, fears the wolves, and eats gritty black rye bread, while half of everything the family grows goes to the landowner.
Year after year, Tiennon tells it all: hard masters and hard winters, fairs and harvests, family quarrels and small joys, and the stubborn hope of a better life on the land.
Émile Guillaumin was himself a farmer in the Bourbonnais, and The Life of a Simple Man is a classic of French rural literature. Its spoken style, sprinkled with local dialect, makes it a rewarding read.
- Author
- Émile Guillaumin
- First published
- 1904
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 73,600 words
How it opens
Je m'appelle Étienne Bertin, mais on m'a toujours nommé «Tiennon». C'est dans une ferme de la commune d'Agonges, tout près de Bourbon-l'Archambault, que j'ai vu le jour au mois de janvier 1823. Mon père était métayer dans cette ferme en communauté avec son frère aîné, mon oncle Antoine, dit «Toinot». Mon père se nommait Gilbert et on l'appelait «Bérot», car c'était la coutume, en ce temps-là, de déformer tous les noms.
Reading La Vie d'un simple 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 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.
