French · Intermediate
Read Une vie in Frenchwith every sentence explained
English title: A Woman's Life
Guy de Maupassant · 1883
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About the book
Une vie by Guy de Maupassant was first published in 1883. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 72,800 words.
She leaves the convent at seventeen, sure that life will be wonderful.
It is 1819. Jeanne Le Perthuis des Vauds, the only daughter of a kind, dreamy baron, finally comes home from years of convent school. Her parents take her to Les Peuples, the family manor on the Normandy coast, where the sea, the sky and the summer seem made for happiness.
Jeanne is innocent, romantic and full of hope. When a handsome young neighbour, the Viscount Julien de Lamare, begins to court her, every walk by the cliffs feels like a page from a novel. But the world outside the convent walls is not quite what she imagined, and the man she marries may not be who he seems.
A Woman's Life was Guy de Maupassant's first novel, a tender and clear-eyed portrait of a woman's hopes and disappointments. Tolstoy admired it deeply, and it was adapted for the screen in 2016.
- Author
- Guy de Maupassant
- First published
- 1883
- Language
- French
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 72,800 words
How it opens
Jeanne, ayant fini ses malles, s'approcha de la fenêtre, mais la pluie ne cessait pas.
L'averse, toute la nuit, avait sonné contre les carreaux et les toits. Le ciel, bas et chargé d'eau, semblait crevé, se vidant sur la terre, la délayant en bouillie, la fondant comme du sucre. Des rafales passaient, pleines d'une chaleur lourde. Le ronflement des ruisseaux débordés emplissait les rues désertes où les maisons, comme des éponges, buvaient l'humidité qui pénétrait au-dedans et faisait suer les murs de la cave au grenier.
Reading Une vie 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 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.
