Read Les Malheurs de Sophie in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Les Malheurs de Sophie by Comtesse de Ségur is a public-domain classic. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under children.

Wax dolls melt. Eyebrows don't grow back thicker. Sophie learns everything the hard way.

Sophie de Réan is four years old, lives in a country château, and simply cannot resist a forbidden idea. She leaves her beautiful new wax doll to warm up in the blazing sun, wanders into the builders' quicklime against her mother's orders, chops her mother's tiny pet fish into a "salad," and snips off her own eyebrows in the hope they will grow back bushier.

Her kind cousin Paul is usually close by, trying to talk her out of her schemes or helping her face the consequences, while her firm but loving mother, Madame de Réan, makes sure each mishap ends with a lesson. Twenty-two short chapters, many told as lively little dialogues, follow her from one disaster to the next.

The Comtesse de Ségur's best-loved book has delighted French children since the 1850s, and Sophie's Misfortunes leads straight into her famous sequels Les Petites Filles modèles and Les Vacances.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of French and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.