Read Les Diaboliques in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Les Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly was first published in 1874. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under horror and mystery and crime.

Six stories of passion and crime, told in low voices after dark.

In a stagecoach crossing western France at nightfall, an old cavalry officer, the Vicomte de Brassard, glimpses a lit window behind a crimson curtain and finally tells the strange secret of his youth. So begins The Diaboliques: six tales of love, pride and wrongdoing, each told by a narrator in a carriage, a drawing room or around a dinner table, to listeners who hardly dare to breathe.

In "Happiness in Crime", a country doctor watches a perfectly happy couple stroll through a Paris garden and recalls how they came together. In "A Woman's Revenge", a great lady chooses the most shocking revenge imaginable on the husband who wronged her. Don Juan, a game of whist and a dinner of atheists complete the set.

When the book appeared in 1874, the authorities seized it as an offence to public morals. Barbey d'Aurevilly's dark, elegant stories remain a high point of French decadent fiction.

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.