Read Trois contes in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Trois contes by Gustave Flaubert was first published in 1877. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 29,700 words.

A servant's quiet heart. A hunter's terrible destiny. A dance that costs a prophet his head.

In his last completed work, Gustave Flaubert offers three perfect stories, each from a different world. "A Simple Heart" follows Félicité, a humble servant in a small Normandy town, who for half a century gives her love to everyone around her, until her devotion finally settles on a parrot named Loulou.

"The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller" is a medieval tale as vivid as a stained-glass window: a young lord who lives only for hunting hears a terrible prophecy from the mouth of a dying stag. In "Herodias", set in a desert fortress above the Dead Sea, King Herod's birthday feast turns towards the fate of his prisoner, John the Baptist.

Flaubert polished every sentence for years, and "A Simple Heart" is still read in French schools as a model of style.

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.