French · Beginner
Read Un bon petit diable in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: A Good Little Devil
Comtesse de Ségur · 1865
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Un bon petit diable by Comtesse de Ségur was first published in 1865. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 47,500 words.
Charles is twelve, an orphan and full of mischief. His miserly cousin has met her match.
In a little Scottish town lives Madame Mac'Miche, a mean, bad-tempered widow who has taken in her young cousin Charles and makes him pay for every crumb. She shuts him in a dark closet, feeds him bread and water and threatens him with the whip. But Charles is clever, bold and full of ideas, and he fights back with tricks and pranks, especially once he discovers that his cousin is terrified of fairies.
His only comforts are Betty, the cheerful maid, and his gentle blind cousin Juliette, who tries to teach him to be good. Then Madame Mac'Miche decides to send him to the dreaded boarding school of the Old Nick brothers, and Charles's courage is put to the test.
The Comtesse de Ségur's lively tale of a big-hearted rebel remains one of her best-loved novels and has been adapted several times for French television.
- Author
- Comtesse de Ségur
- First published
- 1865
- Language
- French
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children
- Length
- About 47,500 words
How it opens
Dans une petite ville d'Ecosse, dans la petite rue des Combats, vivait une veuve d'une cinquantaine d'années, Mme Mac'Miche. Elle avait l'air dur et repoussant. Elle ne voyait personne, de peur de se trouver entraînée dans quelque dépense, car elle était d'une avarice extrême. Sa maison était vieille, sale et triste; elle tricotait un jour dans une chambre du premier étage, simplement, presque misérablement meublée. Elle jetait de temps en temps un coup d'oeil à la fenêtre et paraissait attendre quelqu'un; après avoir donné divers signes d'impatience, elle s'écria:
Reading Un bon petit diable 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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of French and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
