French · Beginner
Read Mémoires d'un âne in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Memoirs of a Donkey
Comtesse de Ségur · 1860
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Mémoires d'un âne by Comtesse de Ségur was first published in 1860. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 50,700 words.
Who says donkeys are stupid? This one is about to prove you wrong.
Cadichon is a donkey with a very high opinion of himself, and he has decided to write his memoirs. As a young donkey he belongs to harsh farmers who load him down for the Tuesday market in the town of Laigle and beat him when he misbehaves. So Cadichon plays tricks on them, and one day he runs away.
From there his life becomes a string of adventures: hiding in the forest, escaping pursuers, winning a donkey race, helping to catch thieves and finally living among a family of lively children at a château. Cadichon is clever, proud, funny and sometimes a little too fond of revenge, and he slowly learns what it means to be truly good.
Memoirs of a Donkey is one of the Comtesse de Ségur's most popular books, a charming tale told by an animal narrator, and an easy, delightful read in French.
- Author
- Comtesse de Ségur
- First published
- 1860
- Language
- French
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children
- Length
- About 50,700 words
How it opens
Je ne me souviens pas de mon enfance; je fus probablement malheureux comme tous les ânons, joli, gracieux comme nous le sommes tous; très certainement je fus plein d'esprit, puisque, tout vieux que je suis, j'en ai encore plus que mes camarades. J'ai attrapé plus d'une fois mes pauvres maîtres, qui n'étaient que des hommes, et qui, par conséquent, ne pouvaient pas avoir l'intelligence d'un âne.
Reading Mémoires d'un âne 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.
