French · Intermediate
Read Le Blé en herbe in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Ripening Seed
Colette · 1923
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Le Blé en herbe by Colette was first published in 1923. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance and young adult. It runs to about 30,000 words.
One more summer by the sea. Two childhood friends. A lady in white who changes everything.
Every year from July to October, Philippe and Vinca spend the holidays with their families on the coast of Brittany. They have grown up side by side, fishing for shrimp among the rocks. But Phil is now sixteen and a half and Vinca fifteen and a half, and childhood is slipping away: they bicker, fall silent and catch themselves looking at each other in new ways.
Then Phil meets Madame Dalleray, an elegant older woman who has rented the nearby villa of Ker-Anna. She offers him a glass of orangeade in her cool, shaded drawing room, and soon he is torn between Vinca's fierce, faithful love and the pull of a grown-up world he does not yet understand.
The Ripening Seed is Colette's tender, sun-soaked story of first love and growing up, filmed by Claude Autant-Lara in 1954.
- Author
- Colette
- First published
- 1923
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance, Young Adult
- Length
- About 30,000 words
How it opens
—Tu vas à la pêche, Vinca?
D'un signe de tête hautain, la Pervenche Vinca aux yeux couleur de pluie printanière, répondit qu'elle allait, en effet, à la pêche. Son chandail reprisé en témoignait, et ses espadrilles racornies par le sel. On savait que sa jupe à carreaux bleus et verts, qui datait de trois ans et laissait voir ses genoux, appartenait à la crevette et aux crabes. Et ces deux havenets sur l'épaule, et ce béret de laine hérissé et bleuâtre comme un chardon des dunes, constituaient-ils une panoplie de pêche, oui ou non?
Reading Le Blé en herbe 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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday French feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
