Short Spooky Stories in French.
Maupassant, Poe, Mérimée and others · 12 Classic Tales of Mystery and Terror
Twelve classic French tales of mystery and terror, from Maupassant, Mérimée and Gautier to Poe in Baudelaire's translation, with a literal English gloss under every word and, in the paperback, 47 illustrations printed in black and white.
284 pages · Paperback & Kindle · About A2–B2
the first sentence of “Le Train 081” (Train 081), the first story in the book
Twelve tales, easiest first.
The work of seven writers and one great translator, in reading order, each tale with a page of introduction before it.
A lover who spends the night in a cemetery beside a grave, a king who sees the windows of a long-closed hall ablaze with light, an engine driver's night run in the cholera summer of 1865, a wounded traveller and a portrait too lifelike to bear: these are twelve classic French tales of mystery and terror, published between 1829 and 1893. The writers are Maupassant, Mérimée, Gautier, Marcel Schwob, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and the Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz, with four tales by Edgar Allan Poe in the French of Charles Baudelaire, whose translations made Poe a classic in France. Each one is short enough to finish in a sitting or two.
Every line of French has its English gloss printed directly beneath it, word by word, so there is nothing to look up. The gloss is literal on purpose. It follows the French word order and gives each word its own meaning, even when the English comes out strange: il se leva is glossed HE HIMSELF ROSE, and both halves of ne … pas are glossed NOT. That strangeness shows you how a French sentence is built, which a smooth translation would hide, and there is no English translation in the book: the gloss is the help. The tales run roughly from the easiest French to the hardest, and each opens with a page of its own: who wrote it and when, where it is set, and eight words to watch for.
The French is the authors' own, lightly modernised for today's learners. Old spellings, the punctuation of dialogue, and words and verb forms no longer in use give way to current ones, 196 small changes in all, each logged and counted on the copyright page. Nothing in the sentences is simplified or shortened, and the passé simple, the past tense of written French, stays throughout, with a one-page primer at the front to help you recognise it. The paperback adds 47 illustrations in the style of nineteenth-century pen-and-watercolour book illustration, printed in black and white: a full-page plate before every story and 35 more inside the tales. The Kindle edition has no illustrations, and there the gloss sits above each word.
- 01Le Train 081Train 081 (Schwob)
- 02La MorteThe Dead Woman (Maupassant)
- 03Les IntersignesOmens of Death (Le Braz, two legends)
- 04La MainThe Hand (Maupassant)
- 05Vision de Charles XIThe Vision of Charles XI (Mérimée)
- 06L’AnkouThe Ankou (Le Braz, two legends)
- 07Le Portrait ovaleThe Oval Portrait (Poe, tr. Baudelaire)
- 08Le Cœur révélateurThe Tell-Tale Heart (Poe, tr. Baudelaire)
- 09La Barrique d’amontilladoThe Cask of Amontillado (Poe, tr. Baudelaire)
- 10La CafetièreThe Coffeepot (Gautier)
- 11La Torture par l’espéranceTorture by Hope (Villiers de l'Isle-Adam)
- 12Le Masque de la mort rougeThe Masque of the Red Death (Poe, tr. Baudelaire)
Four short pages come first: How to Read This Book, The Storyteller's Past Tense (a primer on the passé simple), About the Stories and A Note on Content. Les Intersignes and L’Ankou each give two complete legends from longer chapters of Le Braz's book.
Why this edition.
A gloss under every word
Beneath each French word sits a short, literal English gloss that keeps the French word order. When one French word needs several English ones they are joined with hyphens, so l'homme is THE-MAN and qu'il is THAT-HE. Read the English as a key to the French, not as a translation.
A page before every story
Each tale opens with a short introduction: who wrote it and when, where it is set, and eight words to watch for, from le cimetière and la croix de marbre in La Morte to la charrette, the creaking cart of the Ankou.
The storyteller's past tense
Nearly every story is told in the passé simple, the past tense of books, where conversation would use the passé composé. A one-page primer shows how to spot its endings (il parla, elle ouvrit, il vint) and lists the commonest irregular forms, from je fus to ils dirent. You only need to recognise it.
The authors' own French
Old spellings and words a modern dictionary marks as old give way to current French, and ne … point becomes ne … pas, but every one of the 196 changes is logged. The sentences, their order and their voice are the authors' own. The broken French of the Englishman in La Main is Maupassant's joke, kept on purpose.
Forty-seven illustrations
In the paperback, a full-page plate opens every story and 35 more sit inside the tales, each on a page of its own and captioned with its line of the French: a servant lighting a great candelabrum by his wounded master's bed, a painter at his easel in a tower room. They are printed in black and white. The Kindle edition has none.
Atmosphere, not gore
These are tales of terror for teenage and adult readers. Several involve murder, torture, an execution, death and the dead, but none dwells on blood: the fear comes from fog, candlelight, a clock striking midnight and the slow tightening of suspense.
two short paragraphs of “La Morte” (The Dead Woman), line for line as printed in the paperback
The details.
- Series
- The French Reader
- Language pair
- French–English interlinear
- Format
- Paperback & Kindle
- Print length
- 284 pages
- Source text
- Twelve public-domain tales (1829–1893), Poe in Baudelaire's French; lightly modernised, never simplified
- Illustrations
- 47 in the paperback, printed in black and white: 12 full-page story openers and 35 inside the tales
- Kindle edition
- Reflowable: all twelve tales with the gloss above every French word, each with its introduction, and the guides at the front; no illustrations
- Level
- Teens and adults, about A2–B2
- Published
- October 2026
- ASIN
- B0HNH78N1Q
More in French.
Every edition is glossed by hand, word by word, and printed on demand by Amazon.
Read twelve classic tales of terror in the French their authors wrote, with every word glossed beneath it.
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