Les égouts de Paris
French Listening Comprehension
Study Guide
Take a look at the following for help with any vocabulary and grammar that you might not
have understood in Les égouts de Paris, then take
the test.
| Vocabulary | |
| à la hauteur de | near |
| a priori | at first |
| acheminé | transported, routed |
| s'achever | to complete |
| aménager | to equip, put in, build |
| l'assainissement | (m) drainage system |
| un branchement | connection |
| un champ d'épandage | leach field |
| comporter | to consist of, comprise |
| les déchets | (m) waste |
| la dératisation | rat extermination |
| un écoulement | flow |
| le flot | stream |
| une galerie | tunnel |
| la gestion | management |
| une lacune | deficiency; gap, hole |
| maçonné | bricked |
| la pente | slope |
| la pesanteur | gravity |
| prendre soin de | to be careful to, make a point of |
| quotidiennement | daily |
| un regard | manhole |
| rejeter | to discharge |
| le relevé | meter reading |
| relié à | linked, connected to |
| une rigole | channel, drain |
| saugrenue | ridiculous, preposterous |
| une station d'épuration | water purification plant |
| tenir compte de | to take into account |
| voûté | arched, vaulted |
| Grammar - Click the links for lessons | |
| Present
tense
Future tense |
In journalism and other factual narration, the present and future are often used even though the events are in the past. |
| que l'on | why not "qu'on"? |
| Notes | |
| cholera | Spreading from India in the first half of the 19th century, cholera hit the industralized world with lethal rapidity. Moscow, London, New York, and Paris were all struck almost simultaneously. Some 18,000 died in Paris, the vast majority of them poor people living in appalling conditions. More than 5,500 died in a single week in April 1832. |
| égoutiers | France knows how to look after its public servants, and one way it keeps them happy is by giving them fine uniforms. With their bottle-green overalls, helmets set at a jaunty angle, and flashlights and other equipment dangling from low-slung belts, the égoutier come as near as is humanly possible to making sewerage work actually seem glamorous. |
| Eugène Belgrand | (1810–1878) was one of the first French engineers to understand the importance of hydrology. On the strength of his early work, he was commissioned by Haussmann to oversee the water supply to the capital. |
| Georges Eugène | baron Haussmann (1809–1891) changed the face of Paris with a vast program of redevelopment authorized by Emperor Napoleon III. Appointed prefect for the Seine department in 1853, he spent the next 17 years tearing down large swaths of the medieval city and replacing them with broad avenues lined with the now-famous bourgeois apartment blocks. The story that Napoleon told him to widen the boulevards to allow the army greater ease in suppressing any incipient proletarian uprising cannot be substantiated. He lost his job when Napoleon's rule ended, amid recriminations over the funding of his schemes. But he reemerged later as a Bonapartist deputy for Corsica. The Bonapartists continued to push the interests of the Napoleonic family (Napoleon III was the emperor's nephew) until the end of the century. |
| Jean Valjean | The hero of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862), Jean Valjean saves the student Marius from death on the revolutionary barricades by fleeing through the Paris sewers: "Jean Valjean sentit le pavé se dérober sous lui. Il entra dans cette fange. C'était de l'eau à la surface, de la vase au fond. Il fallait bien passer. Revenir sur ses pas était impossible. Marius était expirant et Jean Valjean exténué. Où aller d'ailleurs ?" |
| Philippe-Auguste | (1165–1223) France's most celebrated medieval monarch, responsible for expanding the crown's authority beyond its Ile-de-France heartland and for planting the first notions of nationalism in his subjects. Ascending to the throne in 1180, he spent the first part of his reign asserting his authority over a recalcitrant baronry before leaving on crusade in 1190. After his return, he began a long struggle with the English Plantagenet kings. His 1214 victory over King John at the Battle of Bouvines is seen by historians as a milestone in the creation of the French nation. His nonmilitary achievements were just as significant. He turned Paris into a proper capital, centralizing the administration there and building the first defensive wall around the city since Gallo-Roman times. A few traces of it can still be seen. |
| le prévôt de Paris | head of Paris's town council in the 14th century |
| Les égouts de Paris French Listening Comprehension Exercise |
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| Listen | Study | Test | ||
| Transcript Translation | ||||
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Sound files, transcript, and notes were
originally published in Champs-Élysées audiomagazine (read my review) and are used with the permission of Champs-Élysées, Inc. |
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