Read Le Docteur Ox in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Le Docteur Ox by Jules Verne was first published in 1874. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy and science fiction.

In Quiquendone, nobody has raised their voice in centuries. Then a doctor offers to light the streets for free.

Missing from every map of Flanders, the little town of Quiquendone is so placid that the smallest decision takes years. Burgomaster van Tricasse and Counsellor Niklausse can spend a whole afternoon barely exchanging a word. So when the eccentric Doctor Ox and his assistant Gédéon Ygène offer to light the entire town with a new gas at their own expense, nobody suspects a thing.

Soon the calmest people in Europe are quarrelling, playing their music at a gallop and talking of war with the neighbouring town. What has the doctor put in the pipes?

The comic title story comes with three more Verne tales: "Master Zacharius", about a proud Geneva clockmaker whose clocks begin to stop; "A Drama in the Air", a balloon flight with a dangerous stranger; and "A Winter amid the Ice", an Arctic search for a missing sailor. Paul Verne's Mont Blanc climb rounds it off.

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.