Read Thérèse Raquin in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola was first published in 1867. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under horror, mystery and crime and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 66,400 words.

A dull marriage. A forbidden passion. A plan that can never be undone.

Thérèse has grown up in silence, raised by her aunt, Madame Raquin, alongside her sickly, spoiled cousin Camille. When she is married to him, nobody asks what she wants. The little family moves to Paris and opens a haberdashery in the damp, gloomy Passage du Pont-Neuf.

Every Thursday evening, the same dull guests come to play dominoes. Then one day Camille brings home an old friend, Laurent, a lazy, powerful, good-looking would-be painter. Between Laurent and Thérèse, something fierce awakens, and soon the lovers can think of only one thing: how to be free of Camille.

Thérèse Raquin is Émile Zola's dark, gripping early novel, a psychological thriller about desire and guilt. It has been adapted many times for stage and screen.

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.