Read Le Rouge et le Noir : chronique du XIXe siècle in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Le Rouge et le Noir : chronique du XIXe siècle by Stendhal was first published in 1830. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance.

A sawmill owner's son, a priest's black coat, and a portrait of Napoleon hidden in his mattress.

Verrières, a little town in the Franche-Comté, a few years after Napoleon's fall. Julien Sorel, the bookish youngest son of a brutal timber sawyer, is clever, proud and burning with ambition. With the army's road to glory closed, he decides that the Church, the black of the title, is the fastest way up, and learns the whole New Testament by heart in Latin to prove it.

His learning wins him a post as tutor to the children of the mayor, Monsieur de Rênal, and puts him under the same roof as the mayor's gentle wife. What begins as a cold plan to conquer her becomes something Julien cannot control, and the scandal it risks could shut every door before he has opened one.

Complete in both volumes, Stendhal's 1830 masterpiece is a sharp satire of Restoration France and one of the first great psychological novels.

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.