Read Mon curé chez les riches in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Mon curé chez les riches by Clément Vautel was first published in 1923. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 59,500 words.

A country priest who talks like a soldier. A pair of new millionaires who think he is a star.

The abbé Pellegrin, parish priest of the village of Sableuse, came home from the trenches with a war cross, a dog called Poilu and the salty slang of the front. His stern bishop is horrified and summons him to demand more dignity, but the old cardinal has other ideas.

Meanwhile, the château of Sableuse has been bought by the Cousinets, a Parisian couple who made a fortune during the war. Madame, a former actress, loves pearls, short skirts and a good show, and she adores the blunt priest, especially once he climbs into the cathedral pulpit and tells the city's comfortable churchgoers exactly what he thinks of them. Monsieur Cousinet, though, has political ambitions, and a popular priest could be very useful.

Clément Vautel's satire My Parish Priest Among the Rich was a huge bestseller of the 1920s and was filmed four times. It is light, lively, slangy fun.

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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday French feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.