French · Intermediate
Read Le Horla in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Horla
Guy de Maupassant · 1887
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About the book
Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant was first published in 1887. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under horror. It runs to about 43,800 words.
Something invisible is drinking the water by his bed. And it is getting stronger.
On a bright May morning in Normandy, a man watches a beautiful Brazilian ship sail past his house on the Seine. Soon after, he starts to feel ill and sleeps badly, haunted by the sense that a presence is sitting on his chest at night. He keeps a diary to understand what is happening to him, and what he writes grows more and more terrifying.
"The Horla" is Guy de Maupassant's masterpiece of the uncanny, and this 1887 collection pairs it with a dozen shorter tales full of irony and dark humour. In "The Inn", two guides are left alone to guard a snowbound mountain hut all winter. In "The Devil", a peasant hires an old woman to watch over his dying mother. In "The Vagabond", a jobless carpenter walks the roads in search of work.
These stories show Maupassant at his sharpest: short, vivid and unforgettable.
- Author
- Guy de Maupassant
- First published
- 1887
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Horror
- Length
- About 43,800 words
How it opens
8 mai. — Quelle journée admirable ! J'ai passé toute la matinée étendu sur l'herbe, devant ma maison, sous l'énorme platane qui la couvre, l'abrite et l'ombrage tout entière. J'aime ce pays, et j'aime y vivre parce que j'y ai mes racines, ces profondes et délicates racines, qui attachent un homme à la terre où sont nés et morts ses aïeux, qui l'attachent à ce qu'on pense et à ce qu'on mange, aux usages comme aux nourritures, aux locutions locales, aux intonations des paysans, aux odeurs du sol, des villages et de l'air lui-même.
Reading Le Horla 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.
