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Encore un tour

C1Romance≈670 words

An anniversary celebration raises questions about what private words belong in public.

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Romance

À la veille d’un anniversaire de mariage, un couple révise une phrase qui lui appartient.

Original short story written for this approximate editorial level.

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La phrase ajoutée

C1Mystery≈650 words

A secretary finds a decision in the minutes that the committee never made.

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Mystery

Une secrétaire retrouve dans un compte rendu une garantie que le comité n’a pas votée.

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Une soirée spontanée

C1Comedy≈660 words

An office social event comes with surprisingly strict rules for spontaneity.

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Comedy

Une responsable souhaite organiser un moment libre avec un programme très précis.

Original short story written for this approximate editorial level.

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La marque des quatre

Arthur Conan Doyle

B2–C1Mystery

A young woman brings Sherlock Holmes a mystery involving her missing father, anonymous gifts, and an unexpected invitation.

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Mystery

A young woman brings Sherlock Holmes a mystery involving her missing father, anonymous gifts, and an unexpected invitation. Holmes and Watson follow a trail through London that links a stolen treasure to old betrayals, a baffling death, and a dangerous pursuit.

Clear investigation scenes include formal descriptions and specialized observational vocabulary.

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Source and license

Doyle, Arthur Conan — La marque des quatre. Translation: Oilliamson, Jeanne de Polignac, comtesse d'. Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76433. Original source notices and contributor credits retained. Catalog title cover: LingoReader.

Les trois mousquetaires

Alexandre Dumas · Auguste Maquet

B2–C1Travel and adventure

Young d'Artagnan arrives in Paris hoping to become a musketeer and finds friendship with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

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Travel and adventure · History

Young d'Artagnan arrives in Paris hoping to become a musketeer and finds friendship with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Their adventures draw them into duels, secret missions, and dangerous court intrigues, where loyalty matters as much as skill with a sword.

Clear action and dialogue help, while period expressions and complex motives need support.

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Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

C1–C2Romance

Emma Bovary dreams of a life filled with the passion and luxury she has found in books.

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Romance · Friendship and family

Emma Bovary dreams of a life filled with the passion and luxury she has found in books. Disappointed by marriage to a provincial doctor, she pursues romance and expensive comforts, while the gap between her imagined life and reality becomes increasingly dangerous.

Subtle social irony and precise descriptive vocabulary make the literary prose demanding.

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Vingt mille Lieues Sous Les Mers — Complete

Jules Verne

B2–C1Science

Professor Aronnax joins a search for a mysterious sea creature and discovers Captain Nemo's remarkable submarine, the Nautilus.

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Science · Travel and adventure · Nature

Professor Aronnax joins a search for a mysterious sea creature and discovers Captain Nemo's remarkable submarine, the Nautilus. Held aboard with two companions, he explores the wonders and dangers of the ocean while trying to understand their secretive captain and find a way home.

Nautical and biological terminology accompanies clear events and formal narration.

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Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours

Jules Verne

B2–C1Travel and adventure

Phileas Fogg wagers that he can travel around the world in eighty days and sets out with his new servant Passepartout.

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Travel and adventure

Phileas Fogg wagers that he can travel around the world in eighty days and sets out with his new servant Passepartout. Trains, ships, unexpected delays, and a pursuing detective turn their carefully timed itinerary into a race that leaves little room for mistakes.

Clear travel events mix formal narration with transport and period-specific vocabulary.

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Notre-Dame de Paris

Victor Hugo

C1–C2History

In medieval Paris, the young dancer Esmeralda draws the attention of men whose desires place her in increasing danger.

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History · Romance

In medieval Paris, the young dancer Esmeralda draws the attention of men whose desires place her in increasing danger. Around the cathedral of Notre-Dame, Quasimodo, Claude Frollo, and others become caught in a story of obsession, compassion, prejudice, and the struggle for refuge.

Historical vocabulary, elaborate descriptions, and varied registers require advanced reading.

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Candide, ou l'optimisme

Voltaire

B2–C1Travel and adventure

Raised to believe that everything happens for the best, Candide is driven from home and thrown into a world of war, disaster, and injustice.

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Travel and adventure · Comedy

Raised to believe that everything happens for the best, Candide is driven from home and thrown into a world of war, disaster, and injustice. His search for the woman he loves becomes a sharp, often absurd journey that repeatedly tests the optimistic philosophy he was taught.

Compact events help orientation, while philosophical satire and historical allusions need context.

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Cyrano de Bergerac

Edmond Rostand

C1–C2Romance

Cyrano is a brilliant poet and fearless swordsman who believes his appearance makes him unworthy of Roxane's love.

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Romance · Comedy · Arts and culture

Cyrano is a brilliant poet and fearless swordsman who believes his appearance makes him unworthy of Roxane's love. When she falls for the handsome Christian, Cyrano lends him his words, creating a romance in which the voice and the face belong to different men.

Verse dialogue, verbal wit, and figurative emotional speech require close interpretation.

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Les Fleurs du mal — recueil de 1857

Charles Baudelaire

C1–C2Arts and culture

Baudelaire's poems explore desire, beauty, despair, and the uneasy pull between spiritual aspiration and everyday corruption.

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Arts and culture

Baudelaire's poems explore desire, beauty, despair, and the uneasy pull between spiritual aspiration and everyday corruption. This 1857 collection moves through intimate longing, disturbing visions, and reflections on death, finding striking images in experiences that can be painful, forbidden, or unexpectedly beautiful.

Compressed verse, inversion, allusion, and dense figurative imagery require interpretive reading.

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Source and license

Baudelaire, Charles — Les Fleurs du mal — recueil de 1857. Complete 100-poem collection in the original 1857 order, including Au lecteur, the six suppressed poems and the author’s Révolte warning. Uses the source’s definitive literary text with printed author variants; this is not a facsimile of the first printing. Original Gautier dedication and epigraph retained. Apollinaire’s later introduction, rejected dedication draft, explanatory footnotes, later enlarged collections and posthumous draft fragments omitted. Source acknowledgement: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61565. Cover: Project Gutenberg source edition; original source cover retained unchanged.

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