The French reading room
Alphonse Daudet
Born in Nîmes in 1840; died in Paris in 1897. The «Lettres de mon moulin» (1869) are stories and sketches written as if from a windmill in Provence; the «Contes du lundi» (1873) gather his Monday stories, many of them from the war of 1870 and its aftermath. The room holds three.
| Story | In English | From | Words | Sentences |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Le curé de Cucugnan | The Priest of Cucugnan | Lettres de mon moulin, 1869 | 1,705 | 156 |
| La Dernière Classe | The Last Lesson | Contes du lundi, 1873 | 1,755 | 98 |
| La chèvre de monsieur Seguin | Monsieur Seguin’s Goat | Lettres de mon moulin, 1869 | 2,059 | 149 |
What he adds, counted
These three run to 5,519 words in 403 sentences, from 1,123 distinct dictionary words — and 697 of those never appear in Perrault's five, against 426 the two share. That is the honest shape of this shelf: the vocabulary of a village church, a hillside pasture and a schoolroom is not the vocabulary of fairy tales, and a reader who comes to Daudet from Charles Perrault will find more new words in the first pages than the length alone suggests. The reading order prices each step.
Nineteenth-century prose, and a different past
Daudet's sentences are shorter: 13.7 words a sentence across these three, against 25.1 in Perrault's five, and «La chèvre de monsieur Seguin» is written as a letter to a poet in Paris. His stories lean less on the passé simple of written storytelling, too: the forms «fut», «furent», «eut» and «eurent» appear 11 times in these three, about 2.0 in every thousand words, against 4.6 in Perrault's five.
Reading him in the original
Every word is glossed where it stands and an English line sits under each sentence until you ask for it. All three stories are part of the library, at €5 a month or €39 a year, one subscription for every room in the house; each story's page carries its opening sentence with its English. «La Dernière Classe» by Charles Perrault is free, entire, and needs no account — the usual first step before these.
All eight French tales · Charles Perrault · the shelf, counted