Reading French: 3rd Level

A letter written by Simone Weil in response to Georges Bernanos’s les Grands cimetières sous la lune (1938), in which he commented on events he witnessed in Majorca shortly before (1936-37) during the Spanish Civil War.

A summary, in modern French prose, of the principal ideas contained in the first part of Nicolas Boileau’s Art poétique (1674).

A moderately difficult text for French reading practice, this is sketch for an article written by Simone Weil in or around 1939. It gives a very brief overview of “barbarity,” i.e., cruelty, from ancient times to the present.

A text of a scene from Jacques Demy’s les Demoiselles de Rochefort written in alexandrines, with commentary and English translation.

A letter by George Bernanos dated 1939, written to an imaginary correspondent, a young writer Bernanos conceives of as facing the same doubts and difficulties he himself had known.

Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV (1751) was one of the works in which he inaugurated a new kind of historiography, one more interested in portraying a total civilization than in detailing kings and their wars.

Examples of the conditionnel concessif from Chloderlos de Laclos’s famous epistolary novel of 1782. Some involve the conditional present introduced by quand (rather than the imperfect indicative introduced by si), and some involve the imperfect subjunctive.

Two scenes from Dialogues des Carmélites by Bernanos (†1948), in which Blanche de la Force gets to hear the spiritual doctrine of the Prioress Mother Henriette. With English translation.

A videoclip of the scene from the 1984 film version of Dialogues des Carmélites in which Blanche meets with the Prioress, Mère Henriette, for the first time, together with the French text as adapted for this production and an English translation.

A passage that sums up Maurice Blondel’s thinking about how Christian teachings develop as they spread through time and space. French text with English translation.