Read Le Portrait de Dorian Gray in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Le Portrait de Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde was first published in 1893. In Passage you read the full text in the French translation by Albert Savine, marked advanced and filed under fantasy and horror. It runs to about 75,900 words.

He stays young and beautiful forever. His portrait pays the price.

In a London studio, the painter Basil Hallward puts the finishing touches to his masterpiece: a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty and innocence. But as Dorian listens to the witty, cynical Lord Henry Wotton praise youth and pleasure above all else, he makes a reckless wish: that the painting might grow old instead of him.

Soon Dorian falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a young actress who plays Shakespeare in a shabby little theatre, and he discovers how much power his charm gives him. Then, one evening, he notices something strange in the face on the canvas...

Oscar Wilde's only novel caused a scandal on publication and has fascinated readers ever since. Here it appears in Albert Savine's early French translation, as elegant and unsettling as the original.

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.