French · Advanced
Read Les Faux-monnayeurs in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Counterfeiters
André Gide · 1925
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About the book
Les Faux-monnayeurs by André Gide was first published in 1925. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 116,900 words.
A bundle of old love letters. A boy who walks out. A novelist writing a book called The Counterfeiters.
On a stifling Paris afternoon, three weeks before his exams, Bernard Profitendieu opens a drawer, finds a packet of letters and learns that the man he calls father is not his father. He decides on the spot to leave home, with nothing but his nerve and his quick tongue.
His friend Olivier Molinier, shy and thoughtful, is waiting for his uncle Édouard, a novelist coming back from England. Édouard is writing a book called The Counterfeiters, and when Bernard gets hold of his private journal by chance, their lives begin to tangle. Around them circle Olivier's brother Vincent and the unhappy Laura, the glittering Count de Passavant and a whole crowd of young people trying out true and false selves.
The Counterfeiters is André Gide's boldest book, a playful, many-voiced novel about honesty and pretence that helped shape the modern novel.
- Author
- André Gide
- First published
- 1925
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Young Adult
- Length
- About 116,900 words
How it opens
— C’est le moment de croire que j’entends des pas dans le corridor, se dit Bernard. Il releva la tête et prêta l’oreille. Mais non : son père et son frère aîné étaient retenus au Palais ; sa mère en visite ; sa sœur à un concert ; et quant au puîné, le petit Caloub, une pension le bouclait au sortir du lycée chaque jour. Bernard Profitendieu était resté à la maison pour potasser son bachot ; il n’avait plus devant lui que trois semaines. La famille respectait sa solitude ; le démon pas. Bien que Bernard eût mis bas sa veste, il étouffait.
Reading Les Faux-monnayeurs 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.
