French · Advanced
Read Sous le soleil de Satan in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: Under the Sun of Satan
Georges Bernanos · 1926
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About the book
Sous le soleil de Satan by Georges Bernanos was first published in 1926. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and horror. It runs to about 88,800 words.
A reckless girl in a northern village. A tormented young priest. And the devil waiting on a dark road.
In Campagne, a village in Artois, sixteen-year-old Germaine Malorthy, known as Mouchette, is the brewer's daughter, and she is carrying the child of the local nobleman, the Marquis de Cadignan. Proud, defiant and desperate, she is ready to stand up to her father, her lover and the whole village.
In the same parish, the abbé Donissan, a big, clumsy and painfully humble young curate, serves under the wise old abbé Menou-Segrais. He punishes his body, doubts every gift he has and fights a battle no one around him can see. One night, lost on a lonely road, he meets a stranger who knows far too much about him, and his path and Mouchette's are bound to cross.
Under the Sun of Satan was Georges Bernanos's explosive debut in 1926. Maurice Pialat's film, starring Gérard Depardieu, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1987.
- Author
- Georges Bernanos
- First published
- 1926
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Horror
- Length
- About 88,800 words
How it opens
Voici l’heure du soir qu’aima P. J. Toulet. Voici l’horizon qui se défait—un grand nuage d’ivoire au couchant et, du zénith au sol, le ciel crépusculaire, la solitude immense, déjà glacée,—plein d’un silence liquide... Voici l’heure du poète qui distillait la vie dans son cœur, pour en extraire l’essence secrète, embaumée, empoisonnée.
Reading Sous le soleil de Satan 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 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.
