Read Vingt mille lieues sous les mers in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers by Jules Verne was first published in 1870. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction.

1866: something enormous is ramming ships, and no one knows what it is.

Sailors across the world report a gigantic creature, longer and faster than any whale, that glows in the night and strikes vessels without warning. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Paris Museum of Natural History, joins an American frigate sent to hunt it down, along with his devoted servant Conseil and the hot-tempered Canadian harpooner Ned Land.

The “monster” turns out to be a submarine, the Nautilus, and its master is the brilliant, embittered Captain Nemo, who has broken with dry land for good. Taken aboard as guests who may never leave, the three men begin a voyage through coral forests, sunken wrecks and polar ice, twenty thousand leagues across the world’s oceans.

Jules Verne’s 1870 adventure helped invent science fiction, and Nemo remains one of literature’s great enigmas. This is the complete, unabridged French text.

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.