Read Madame Bovary in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert was first published in 1857. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance.

Emma has read all the novels. Now she wants a life to match them.

The story opens in a schoolroom, where a clumsy country boy named Charles Bovary is laughed at on his very first day. He grows up to be a modest, plodding doctor in Normandy, and when he is called to set a farmer's broken leg, he meets the farmer's daughter, Emma Rouault, convent-educated and full of romantic dreams.

Marriage, Emma believes, will bring the passion she has read about. Instead it brings the small town of Tostes, a kind husband who bores her, and long, empty afternoons. One dazzling ball at a marquis's château gives her a taste of another world, and after that nothing at home is ever enough. When the couple move to Yonville, flattery, temptation and debt are waiting.

Flaubert was put on trial for offending public morals over Madame Bovary in 1857, and the novel's precise, unsparing style changed modern fiction for ever.

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.