Read Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne in French and English, a parallel text graded reader with audio. Available in CEFR levels A2, B1, B2, and C1.
About this book
At eleven twenty-nine in the morning on October 2nd, Phileas Fogg hires a French valet and dismisses the previous one over two degrees of water in his shaving bowl. By nightfall he has wagered half his fortune at the Reform Club that he can circle the globe in eighty days, and is gone. He sits bolt upright, feet together, hands on his knees, a man for whom "unexpected things don't happen," and whose response to risking a fortune at whist is to observe that diamonds are trumps.
The world declines to cooperate. When the Indian railway ends unfinished, Fogg simply buys an elephant, and in the forest beyond he pulls a young widow, Aouda, from a forced sacrifice; she joins the party as it races on toward Hong Kong by rail and steamer. At his heels comes Fix, a small, sharp-eyed London detective convinced this composed gentleman is a bank robber in flight, forever contriving one more delay. And there is Passepartout, a former acrobat, loyal and hapless, drawn into every disaster the road can offer. He wanted a quiet life.
Verne writes it like a ledger and a stopwatch at once, thick with distances and costs and timetables, pausing at each new place for a page of geography before the prose breaks into motion again: sails rustling like white wings through a typhoon, a hundred Sioux leaping onto a moving train, metal ropes singing like violin strings across the snow. The wit runs underneath it all, deadpan and dry, most of the grand gestures reduced to plain arithmetic.
What lingers, though, is the quieter arithmetic: the man with the most to lose stays the calmest, the detective who means to trap Fogg finds himself taking a punch to protect him, and somewhere between Bombay and the Atlantic a journey undertaken for a bet becomes something its hero would never have thought to schedule. Whether eighty days is enough is a matter of hours — and Fogg, of course, is counting.
Available editions
A2
Short, concrete sentences for early learners.
7,209 sentences
B1
Longer sentences and a wider vocabulary.
3,933 sentences
B2
Complex sentences and a fuller vocabulary, close to everyday native reading.
3,577 sentences
C1
Original English — Rich, nuanced prose with complex sentences and vocabulary.
3,523 sentences
Read a sample
Chapters
1 / 37
Ou Phileas Fogg et Passepartout s'acceptent mutuellement, l'un comme maitre, l'autre comme serviteur
In which Phileas Fogg and Passepartout accept each other, the one as master, the other as man
1
M. Fogg vivait à Londres en 1872.
Mr. Phileas Fogg lived in London in 1872.
2
Son adresse était le 7 Saville Row, Burlington Gardens.
His address was 7 Saville Row, Burlington Gardens.
3
Il était membre du Reform Club.
He was a member of the Reform Club.
4
Il n'aimait pas attirer l'attention.
He did not like attention.
5
Les gens savaient très peu de choses sur lui.
People knew very little about him.
6
C'était un gentleman aux bonnes manières.
He was a gentleman with good manners.
7
Certaines personnes disaient qu'il ressemblait au poète Byron.