French · Advanced
Read Le Père Goriot in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Father Goriot
Honoré de Balzac · 1835
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About the book
Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac was first published in 1835. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 93,000 words.
A shabby boarding house. A young man with big dreams. An old man who gave everything away.
Paris, 1819. In the faded Maison Vauquer, a cheap boarding house in the Latin Quarter, a strange mix of lodgers share their meals. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a poor law student from the provinces burning to make his mark, and old Goriot, a retired pasta maker whom everyone mocks as he grows poorer by the month.
Rastignac soon learns Goriot's secret: his two elegant daughters, married into high society, have drained his fortune. As Eugène tries to enter that glittering world himself, the mysterious Vautrin whispers a cynical lesson about how success is really won.
Father Goriot is the heart of Honoré de Balzac's Human Comedy, a vivid picture of money, love and ambition, and "Rastignac" has become a byword for a young man determined to conquer the city.
- Author
- Honoré de Balzac
- First published
- 1835
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 93,000 words
How it opens
Madame Vauquer, née de Coflans, est une vieille femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, entre le quartier latin et le faubourg Saint-Marceau. Cette pension, connue sous le nom de la Maison Vauquer, admet également des hommes et des femmes, des jeunes gens et des vieillards, sans que jamais la médisance ait attaqué les mœurs de ce respectable établissement. Mais aussi depuis trente ans ne s’y était-il jamais vu de jeune personne, et pour qu’un jeune homme y demeure, sa famille doit-elle lui faire une bien maigre pension.
Reading Le Père Goriot 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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate French book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
