French · Intermediate
Read Le Château des Carpathes in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Carpathian Castle
Jules Verne · 1892
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About the book
Le Château des Carpathes by Jules Verne was first published in 1892. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under horror and science fiction. It runs to about 50,500 words.
No one has lived in the castle for years. So who has just lit a fire?
In the remote village of Werst, deep in Transylvania, the shepherd Frik peers through a pedlar's spyglass and sees smoke rising from the ruined castle of the Barons de Gortz. The villagers are terrified: everyone knows the old fortress is haunted.
The brave young forester Nic Deck and the boastful, cowardly doctor Patak set off to investigate, and strange things happen to them on the way. Then a young nobleman passes through, Count Franz de Télek, who still mourns the great opera singer La Stilla. When he hears the name of Gortz, he turns pale.
Jules Verne blends Gothic ghost story and science in this atmospheric tale, published five years before Dracula and set in the same wild mountains. As Verne warns from the first line, the story is not fantastic, only romantic... or is it?
- Author
- Jules Verne
- First published
- 1892
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Horror, Science Fiction
- Length
- About 50,500 words
How it opens
Cette histoire n'est pas fantastique, elle n'est que romanesque. Faut-il en conclure qu'elle ne soit pas vraie, étant donné son invraisemblance? Ce serait une erreur. Nous sommes d'un temps où tout arrive,—on a presque le droit de dire où tout est arrivé. Si notre récit n'est point vraisemblable aujourd'hui, il peut l'être demain, grâce aux ressources scientifiques qui sont le lot de l'avenir, et personne ne s'aviserait de le mettre au rang des légendes.
Reading Le Château des Carpathes 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.
