French · Beginner
Read Les Vacances in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Holidays
Comtesse de Ségur · 1859
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Les Vacances by Comtesse de Ségur was first published in 1859. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 42,500 words.
Summer at the château: cabins to build, ghosts to catch, and an incredible tale of shipwreck.
At the château de Fleurville, everything is in a joyful uproar. Camille, Madeleine, Marguerite and Sophie are rushing to arrange flowers and finish their preparations before their cousins Léon, Jean and Jacques arrive for the summer holidays. Soon the children are building their own cabins in the garden, exploring the forest by the mill, playing tricks and squabbling like real brothers and sisters.
Then Sophie agrees to tell a story she barely remembers: the shipwreck she lived through when she was only four years old. And an unexpected encounter brings to Fleurville travellers everyone thought lost forever, with tales of the sea and of a faraway island.
The final part of the Comtesse de Ségur's famous trilogy, after Sophie's Misfortunes and Good Little Girls, this is a sunny, adventurous story of friendship and family.
- Author
- Comtesse de Ségur
- First published
- 1859
- Language
- French
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children
- Length
- About 42,500 words
How it opens
Tout était en l'air au château de Fleurville. Camille et Madeleine de Fleurville, Marguerite de Rosbourg et Sophie Fichini, leurs amies, allaient et venaient, montaient et descendaient l'escalier, couraient dans les corridors, sautaient, riaient, criaient, se poussaient. Les deux mamans, Mme de Fleurville et Mme de Rosbourg, souriaient à cette agitation, qu'elles ne partageaient pas, mais qu'elles ne cherchaient pas à calmer; elles étaient assises dans un salon qui donnait sur le chemin d'arrivée.
Reading Les Vacances 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 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.
