French · Intermediate
Read Le Grand Meaulnes in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Wanderer
Alain-Fournier · 1913
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier was first published in 1913. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under romance and young adult. It runs to about 63,300 words.
A lost path. A strange party in a hidden manor. A girl he cannot forget.
In the quiet village of Sainte-Agathe, deep in the French countryside, fifteen-year-old François Seurel lives in the school where his parents teach. One winter, a tall, bold seventeen-year-old boarder arrives: Augustin Meaulnes, whom the other boys soon call "the great Meaulnes".
One day Meaulnes sets off with a borrowed cart and vanishes for three days. When he returns, he is changed. He has stumbled upon a mysterious estate where children in old-fashioned costumes were celebrating a wedding, and there he met a beautiful young woman. But he has no idea how to find the place again, and with François's help, he becomes obsessed with the search.
The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes) is Alain-Fournier's only novel, a haunting, dreamlike story of adolescence and lost happiness that the French adore.
- Author
- Alain-Fournier
- First published
- 1913
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance, Young Adult
- Length
- About 63,300 words
How it opens
Il arriva chez nous un dimanche de novembre 189…
Je continue à dire «chez nous», bien que la maison ne nous appartienne plus. Nous avons quitté le pays depuis bientôt quinze ans et nous n'y reviendrons certainement jamais.
Nous habitions les bâtiments du Cours Supérieur de Sainte-Agathe. Mon père, que j'appelais M. Seurel, comme les autres élèves, y dirigeait à la fois le Cours supérieur, où l'on préparait le brevet d'instituteur, et le Cours moyen. Ma mère faisait la petite classe.
Reading Le Grand Meaulnes 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.
