Upper-intermediate stories
Original French stories written for this level, with comprehension questions.
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Le grand saut
A Bordeaux accountant gives up a secure job to become a baker, and one morning her former boss walks into her shop.
Le chat en visioconférence
During the most important video call of his quarter, a sales director's cat reveals a secret from his past to forty colleagues.
Partir à la campagne
A Parisian couple moves to a hamlet in the Creuse, where the locals keep their distance until the village school is threatened.
Les poubelles de la rue Paradis
Fed up with a rubbish collectors' strike in Marseille, a retired teacher goes to the depot to give the strikers a piece of her mind.
Des tomates sur le toit
An unemployed landscape designer in Roubaix wants to turn the roof of her tower block into a vegetable garden, against the advice of her grumpiest neighbour.
Mamie Josette, deux millions d'abonnés
A Toulouse grandmother becomes an internet star while making her cassoulet, and a frozen-food brand comes knocking.
Cherche appartement désespérément
A young night nurse who cannot find a flat in Paris tries intergenerational housing with a very demanding old man.
Un mois sans smartphone
A Lyon journalist accepts his editor's challenge to spend a month with an old flip phone and keeps a diary of the experience.
Candidat malgré lui
When nobody in his Jura village will stand for mayor, a painfully shy cheesemaker is pushed into the race.
Du haut-fourneau à l'éolienne
A report on a former Lorraine steelworker, afraid of heights, who retrained to maintain wind turbines.
La famille sans voiture
When their old car dies on the motorway, a Strasbourg father talks his family into living for a year with a cargo bike instead.
Désactivé
A top-rated food delivery rider in Montpellier is suddenly cut off by the app he works for, with no explanation and no one to call.
L'affaire du platane
A plan to cut down a century-old plane tree for a new cycle lane sets a Nantes neighbourhood at war with itself.
La poubelle de l'année
An Angers family signs up for a zero-waste challenge, and the father turns it into a fierce competition with the neighbours.
Le recruteur virtuel
A laid-off logistics manager in her fifties faces a job interview conducted by an artificial intelligence.
Les chèvres de Mathilde
A Paris engineer leaves her consulting job to take over an old goat farmer's herd in the Ardèche, with the former owner watching her every move.
Deux cortèges
A union railway worker and his climate-activist daughter in Rennes mock each other's protests, until both marches meet on the same day.
Une étoile sur cinq
A Dijon bistro owner is hit by a wave of scathing online reviews from a mysterious "Napoléon B." and sets out to unmask the culprit.
Quarante-deux degrés à l'ombre
A report from a building site near Nîmes, where a foreman reorganises everything to protect his crew from a heatwave.
Le règlement intérieur
To end the washing-up war in a Grenoble flatshare, a computer science student invents an app that awards points for every household chore.
La valise du grenier
Clearing out her late grandmother's flat in Lyon, Clémence finds a suitcase that was not to be opened before its owner's death.
L'hortensia de Plougastel
Three Breton siblings who no longer speak to each other discover that their father's will comes with a strange condition.
Le soir de la rue Gay-Lussac
A history student finds an archive photo from May 1968 that contradicts her grandfather's favorite story.
La sacoche du taxi jaune
A Dakar taxi driver finds a bag full of money under his passenger seat, and he is not the only one looking for its owner.
Tempête à Kamouraska
Snowed in at a Québec inn, a French traveler watches the landlady investigate a missing diamond ring.
Le boulanger de trois heures
A Bordeaux baker discovers that someone is getting into her bakehouse at night, not to steal but to bake.
La lampe de Stanisław
A history teacher from the northern coalfield finds out what really happened to the Polish miner her family never talks about.
Le portrait d'Ixelles
A young man in Brussels inherits a worthless painting from his great-aunt, until a stranger offers him a fortune for it.
Le coffre 314
In Geneva, a young lawyer and her greedy uncle open the safe-deposit box her grandmother left her.
Les lettres du Robert
Interviewing her Martinican grandmother for a school project on migration, a teenager finds a bundle of letters from a forgotten fiancé.
Le voleur du Vieux-Port
Things keep vanishing from a café terrace in Marseille, and the owner thinks he knows who the thief is.
Le carnet de Joseph
In the autumn of 1945, a young Alsatian forced into the German army comes home from a Soviet prison camp and keeps a diary.
Le maquis de tante Adjoua
A young Ivorian living in Lyon inherits his aunt's open-air restaurant in Abidjan and flies over to sell it.
L'alibi du plombier
A burly plumber from Roubaix accused of burglary would rather risk prison than reveal where he was that night.
La clé d'Oran
A young woman travels to Oran with the key to the flat her grandmother's family left in 1962.
Le corbeau de Saint-Aubin
Anonymous letters are poisoning a Burgundy village, and a retired gendarme reluctantly agrees to find out who is writing them.
Le temps des sucres
A young graphic designer from Montreal inherits her grandfather's sugar shack in the Beauce instead of the uncle who has run it for forty years.
La montre du Doubs
A watchmaker in the Swiss Jura is asked to repair a pocket watch that stopped in 1943, and its story leads back to her own family.
Le Vaval a disparu
Just before carnival in Guadeloupe, a group's giant carnival king vanishes, and a teenage girl sets out to find it before a feud breaks out.
Le faussaire de la rue Lepic
An elderly, unsuccessful Montmartre painter tells his great-nephew that one of his paintings hangs in a museum under someone else's name.