Mastery 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 Point-virgule disparu
In a pastiche of the French roman noir, a down-at-heel Marseille private eye is hired by a formidable proofreader to find out who stole a semicolon from a famous novelist's manuscript.
L'Horloge de Morteau
In the manner of a nineteenth-century conte fantastique, an engineer inherits a clockmaker's grandfather clock in the Haut-Doubs, along with a warning never to wind it after midnight.
Correspondance sur un mot
An epistolary story: a translator in Pondicherry writes to a Paris lexicographer to complain that his dictionary is missing a meaning of the word "dépaysement".
La Table numéro six
In the cool, object-by-object manner of the nouveau roman, a café table on the Grand-Place in Lille is observed for an afternoon while someone waits.
Le Dictionnaire des mots qui manquent
A retired French teacher in Rennes fills a notebook with words the language lacks, and becomes famous, and an enemy of the Académie française, when her grandson posts it online.
Le Parapluie, en cinq manières
A trivial mix-up with two identical umbrellas on a Bordeaux tram is retold as a police report, a précieux letter, a sports commentary and a horoscope, before a final witness speaks up.
Le Miroir en avance
An antique dealer on the rue Mouffetard buys an old Venetian mirror at auction and discovers that her reflection moves a little before she does.
La Prête-plume
In a series of emails, a Montreal ghostwriter drafts the memoirs of a former hockey star, who finds his own childhood more beautiful on the page than it ever was.
Il eût fallu que vous vinssiez
A retired Dijon notary who speaks only in the imperfect subjunctive is sent by his daughter to a speed-dating evening.
Mémoires d'un chat de Montparnasse
In the grand manner of a court memoirist, the resident cat of a Montparnasse café chronicles the rise of a dangerous new favourite.
Le vin était trop noir
A roman noir set in Burgundy: a former sommelier turned private detective is hired to find who is counterfeiting a famous estate's wine, and tastes something he did not expect.
L'Homme qui perdait ses mots
A conte fantastique: in Brussels, a conference interpreter finds that each morning one word has vanished from the language, and the thing it named has vanished from the world.
Une vie à rebours
The story of a Dakar couple is told backwards, from a widow's evening on the corniche to the morning, forty-five years earlier, when everything began.
Le Mot de la fin
A grand old actor of the Comédie-Française has spent forty years polishing his last words, but death keeps failing to show up on cue.
Les Liaisons numériques
In the style of an eighteenth-century epistolary novel, two Lyon friends who call each other "la Marquise" and "le Vicomte" exchange messages about a seduction wager on a dating app.
Le Chat botté de la Défense
A pastiche of Perrault's fairy tales: a penniless philosophy graduate inherits nothing but a cat, which asks only for a pair of trainers and an access badge to a La Défense tower.
Le Train de 4 h 44
A conte fantastique in the Swiss Jura: a night nurse who has missed her last train sees an unscheduled one pull into La Chaux-de-Fonds station at 4:44 in the morning.
Le Personnage en grève
A Quebec crime novelist sits down to write the twelfth adventure of her famous inspector, and discovers that he has gone on strike.
Une seule phrase
Told in one single sentence, a consultant stranded by a delayed train at Lyon Part-Dieu drifts to the end of a platform and remembers her father, a railwayman.
Vers, verre, vert
A glassblower in Biot mishears a poet's telephone order, and a love story unfolds among the homophones of the French language.
L'Île des Raisonnables
In 1763 a shipwrecked Breton sailor lands among a people who must justify every act by reason, and is put on trial for laughing.
Le Marchand de silence
A stranger arrives at the great market of Bamako selling jars that he says contain silence, and a shea-butter seller decides to find out what he is really after.
Le Registre du passeur
An archivist in Nantes finds the logbook of a Loire ferryman from the Terror and pieces together what he did one winter night in 1793.
Lettre sur l'art de réparer
A retired engineer from Saint-Étienne writes to his granddaughter at a tech start-up about the forgotten virtue of mending things.
Le Banquet des contraires
In a café on the Croix-Rousse, a mathematician and a poet resume their monthly argument over whether truth is discovered or invented, under the eye of a waiter who keeps score.
La Marge du cahier
In the spring of 1789 a young village clerk writes down his parish's grievances for the Estates General, and a widow who cannot sign asks him to add one more.
Le Perruquier de Versailles
A royal wigmaker who has kept the court's secrets for thirty years is offered a fortune for a compromising letter, and discovers who wants to buy it.
La Demoiselle du téléphone
During the 1900 World's Fair, a Paris switchboard operator forbidden to say anything but set formulas receives a desperate call in the middle of the night.
Les Recettes de Verdun
In 1916 a soldier at Verdun and his wife in the Périgord invent a code of recipes to get the truth past the army censors.
Le Linge de la ligne
In 1942 a laundress crosses the demarcation line at Vierzon every day with her baskets, until the day she is asked to carry something heavier than letters.
La Draille
A young vet sent to test GPS collars on a Provençal transhumance walks to the Alps with an old head shepherd who trusts only his goats.
La Proëlla
On the island of Ouessant in 1927, a widow has already buried her sailor husband in wax when he walks back into the village.
L'Enseigne
Restoring the old sign of a family bakery in Colmar, a conservator uncovers layer after layer of Alsace's changing nationalities.
La Cabane sur le Saguenay
A young Parisian visits her great-uncle in Quebec for a winter of ice fishing and learns that her French is not the only one, nor the oldest.
La Parole et le micro
A young radio journalist in Saint-Louis du Sénégal wants to record an old griot before his stories are lost, but he has his own ideas about what memory is.
Éloge de l'ennui
Stuck for three hours in a broken-down train with a dead phone, an essayist rediscovers a feeling he had spent years avoiding.
La Lettre de madame Valade
A notary in Périgueux holds a sealed letter that a dead client's son may receive only if he contests her will, and the son does not want to contest it.
Trois lettres
A juror at the assize court in Rennes must decide, by her inner conviction alone, the fate of a nurse who helped his own dying mother end her life.
Dialogue sur le pardon
In a village in Corrèze, the grandson of a wartime informer comes to ask forgiveness of a former Resistance member whose brother was shot in 1944.
Le Souper de madame d'Aubrac
At a Paris salon in 1772, a philosopher, an abbé and a doctor debate whether a dying man should be told the truth, and the question turns out to be less abstract than it seems.