Read Notre-Dame de Paris, tome 1 in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Notre-Dame de Paris, tome 1 by Victor Hugo was first published in 1831. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance.

Paris, 6 January 1482. The crowd is about to crown the ugliest man in the city Pope of Fools.

On the Feast of Fools, Parisians pack the Palace of Justice for a mystery play by the hapless poet Pierre Gringoire, but nobody wants to watch it. All eyes turn instead to the contest of grimaces, won by Quasimodo, the one-eyed, hunchbacked bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, and to La Esmeralda, a beautiful young dancer who performs in the square with her clever goat.

Before the night is over, Gringoire stumbles into the city's underworld, Esmeralda is attacked in a dark street, and Phoebus, a dashing captain of archers, rides to the rescue. Watching from the shadows is the stern archdeacon Claude Frollo, Quasimodo's master.

This first volume (Books One to Six) also takes you up the towers for a bird's-eye view of medieval Paris. Victor Hugo's 1831 novel helped save the real cathedral and still inspires films and musicals.

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.