The Diaboliques
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- French majors or learners with some French reading ability
- Readers studying nineteenth-century French literature and short stories
- Literature enthusiasts interested in Gothic, gloomy narrative styles
- Readers needing public-domain French texts for translation practice
Not a good fit for
- General readers without French who wish to read a Chinese translation
- Readers expecting modern annotations, introductions, or detailed background
- Readers who prefer light, lively, plot-simple entertainment
Reading tips
- First learn about the literary background of Barbey d'Aurevilly's era, then read story by story; it is not necessary to read straight through in order.
- When encountering unfamiliar expressions, infer from context or consult a French dictionary and translations in parallel, maintaining reading rhythm.
- After each story, briefly note character relationships and narrative turns to help understand the author's hints.
- Read alongside other nineteenth-century French short story anthologies to observe similarities and differences in subject matter and technique.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
FAQ
Is this book in Chinese or French?
Does the Gutenberg edition include annotations or an introduction?
Is it suitable for French beginners?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808–1889) was a French novelist and literary critic. Born into a Norman aristocratic family, he held Catholic and legitimist convictions that deeply shaped both his fiction and his criticism. His representative works include Les Diaboliques, Le Chevalier des Touches, and the critical collection Philosophes et Écrivains Religieux. His fiction often deals with morbid passions, hidden crimes, and struggles of conscience, written in a cold, dramatic style that probes human nature and faith through extreme situations, making him one of the most distinctive French writers of the later nineteenth century. Only three of his works are held in this collection, and public information is limited, so details of his life and a complete bibliography remain to be further verified.
