The French reading room

Perrault and Daudet in the original French

Perrault & Daudet French In the original

Read Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and Alphonse Daudet’s stories in their original French, with word meanings and English translations beside you. Meet a clever cat, a village priest or a classroom on its last morning. Start with a complete free story, and choose where to go next.

Open the French room

The eight, shortest first

12,660 words across 687 sentences.

Tap any word for its dictionary form and meaning; tap a sentence for the English. «La Dernière Classe» is free, entire, and asks for no account, and the opening scene of «Le petit Chaperon rouge» comes free after it. The rest of the shelf is part of the library — €5 a month or €39 a year, and the one subscription opens the French tales and the Spanish, German and Russian shelves alike.

Shortest first, because that is a fair way to meet them: «Le petit Chaperon rouge» is 683 words and reads in a sitting, and «Cendrillon» is 2,208. What each one asks of a reader — dictionary words, how many appear only once, words per sentence — is counted at Perrault and Daudet, counted.

Two authors, and what that means for a reader

Perrault published his five fairy tales in Paris in 1697. Daudet’s three stories come from Lettres de mon moulin (1869) and Contes du lundi (1873).

Perrault's five are fairy tales from the oral tradition: kings, stepmothers, fairies, a wolf and a clever cat, and a vocabulary that comes back tale after tale. Daudet's three are nineteenth-century stories — a village priest and his flock, a goat who leaves her master for the mountain, a schoolroom in Alsace on the last day French is taught there — and each brings a world of its own. Counted on the texts: 426 dictionary words appear in both halves of the shelf, 487 only in Perrault and 697 only in Daudet. That is why the room reads Perrault first, and why the reading order prices every step in new words rather than in length.

The printings

Every text here is modern French. Perrault is set from the Casterman printing of 1902, Daudet from Charpentier (1895) and Lemerre (1880), and nothing here has been simplified, retold or invented. What the tales do carry is the narrative past a textbook teaches late — the passé simple of «fut», «entra», «entrèrent» — which the room glosses back to its infinitive wherever it stands.

What is on each tale's page

Its length and its English title; how many minutes it takes at a learner's pace; how many dictionary words it uses and how many appear exactly once; its chapters as the room reads them; and where it stands on the shelf. «La Dernière Classe» carries the whole tale, French against English, sentence by sentence — and a page of its own for every sentence in it. «Le petit Chaperon rouge» carries its free opening scene the same way.

Questions people ask before they start

How many French words do you need to read a book? · What level are Perrault's fairy tales in French? · Can you learn French just by reading? — each answered with this shelf's own numbers rather than a round figure.

The other four rooms

This is one of five rooms in the same house, built on the same reader. The others hold the Russian classics — Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, with seven of them free — nine German texts from Grimm, Hebel and Kafka, Quiroga's «Cuentos de la selva», and eight Italian tales from Collodi to Pirandello.

Some complete works are free without an account in the interactive reader; other books offer free openings. Free lesson samples are also available. A free account keeps your saved words and progress across devices. Free reading and membership.