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Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
Ten tutorials on the literary written French language at advanced level (CEFR B2 → C1), led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum — founding member of the Académie française and author of the Remarques sur la langue française (1647), the work that codified le bon usage. The full grammar inventory, syntax, register, reading at speed, translation as a discipline, and writing the argumentative essay. Text-only by design — no phonology, no listening, no speaking. The first strand of the French Language and Literature programme.
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Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
What is *literary* French, and why is it different from the French of conversation, of the email, of the text message? What carries meaning on the page that does not carry on the tongue, and how does the cultivated reader of French recognise the difference at a glance? Before any rule of grammar, this is the orientation: the page is not the voice, and our work for the next ten modules is on the page.
Outcome
The student can identify what makes a piece of written French *written* (rather than transcribed-spoken), recognise the four registers from cues on the page alone, and articulate what the visible signs of French (accents, punctuation, elision) carry that the corresponding speech does not.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you a single short paragraph in two versions: one written for the page in the *register soutenu*, the other transcribed verbatim from a hypothetical café conversation. The content is the same; the realisations are wildly different. Your task is to read both *silently* and produce a written analysis (in French where you can; English permitted as scaffolding) of the differences: which words change, which constructions appear in one and not the other, what punctuation does in the written version that nothing does in the spoken, and what registers each belongs to. You then choose a third register (*courant* — neutral standard) and rewrite the paragraph yourself in that register, on the page.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
The French noun does not stand alone. It arrives wrapped in articles, qualified by adjectives that agree with it, fixed in reference by demonstratives or possessives, sometimes preceded by quantifiers and sometimes by both. Get the noun phrase right and half the sentence is right; get it wrong — wrong gender, wrong agreement, wrong choice of article — and every reader who knows French knows you are not yet at home in the language. This module is the noun phrase in full, with particular attention to the partitive article (the structure French has and English does not) and to agreement.
Outcome
The student can write any noun phrase in French — choosing the right article, the right gender, the right number, the right adjective agreement and position — without hesitation, and explain in writing why each choice is correct rather than guessing.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you a 250-word passage of written French in which every article has been deliberately damaged: some replaced with the wrong one (*le* for *du*, *des* for *de*), some omitted, some duplicated. Your task is to produce a corrected version in writing, with each correction marked and a one-line written explanation of why the correction was needed. The passage is in *register courant* — a piece on a French market, vocabulary at B2 level, no specialist terminology. You may consult any reference for vocabulary but the article-and-agreement work is yours.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
French has eight indicative tenses, of which five are in active use in writing today and three are restricted to specific registers. The student of French at C1 must distinguish them all on the page, choose between them in writing without hesitation, and recognise that the *passé simple* and *passé antérieur* — though absent from speech — are essential to literary French. What does each tense actually do, and which does the cultivated French writer reach for when?
Outcome
The student can identify any indicative tense on sight, conjugate every verb form (regular and the high-frequency irregulars *être, avoir, aller, faire, dire, voir, savoir, pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, prendre, mettre, venir, tenir, partir, sortir, lire, écrire*) in any indicative tense, and choose between competing tenses in their own writing — particularly the imperfect-vs-perfect choice — with reasoned justification.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you a 200-word passage from *The Old Man and the Sea* in English. The English uses the simple past throughout — Hemingway's signature flat past tense. Your task is to translate the passage into French in writing, making every tense choice consciously: where the English *he walked* is *il marchait* (description, ongoing) and where it is *il marcha* (a single completed event in literary narrative). You produce a literary French translation suitable for publication, with a brief written commentary on three of your tense choices: which English form, which French form chosen over which alternative, and why.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
The French subjunctive is the great divider between speakers who *know* French and speakers who *use* French. It survives in modern French because it carries meaning the indicative cannot — doubt, desire, possibility, value-judgement, the speaker's stance toward the action. The conditional carries hypothesis. The passive voice is structurally available but used much less than in English; cultivated French prefers the active or the pronominal *se*-construction. This module trains all of it: subjunctive (present and past), conditional (present and past), imperative, passive, and the *se*-pronominal alternative.
Outcome
The student can recognise any subjunctive form in reading; choose between subjunctive and indicative correctly in writing; conjugate verbs in conditional and the four *si*-clause sequences; reformulate active sentences passively and *se*-pronominally; and account in writing for every mood/voice choice in a literary paragraph.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you a 300-word essay written by an advanced French learner. The essay is grammatically correct in tense and agreement but contains seven errors of mood — places where the subjunctive should have been used and was not, and one place where the subjunctive was used and should not have been. Your task is to find all eight, mark them in writing, supply the corrected form, and write one line per correction explaining the trigger (which verb, conjunction, or impersonal expression demands the mood, and why).
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
French pronouns operate by rules of order that English speakers find arbitrary until they are internalised. Two pronouns can stack before a verb in a fixed sequence; *y* and *en* have positions all their own; the imperative reverses the order. Beyond this lies the rich system of relative pronouns — *qui, que, dont, où, lequel* — and the literary register's preference for *ce qui* and *ce dont* in nominalising clauses. This module is the pronoun system in full, with attention to the literary uses that mark advanced French.
Outcome
The student can stack pronouns correctly before any verb (indicative, imperative, infinitive); choose the correct relative pronoun in any context; nominalise with *ce qui / ce que / ce dont*; and produce flowing literary French in which pronoun reference is clear at every step.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you a 200-word paragraph in which the writer, an advanced learner, has avoided pronouns out of caution and repeated nouns instead. The paragraph reads as French but heavy and unidiomatic — *Marie a vu Jean. Marie a parlé à Jean. Marie a donné le livre à Jean.* Your task is to rewrite it in fluent French, replacing nouns with appropriate pronouns wherever a cultivated French writer would, and preserving the meaning. You then write three sentences in commentary: which pronouns you used, what referents they took, and one place where you deliberately *kept* a noun rather than pronominalising — explaining why ambiguity required it.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
The literary French sentence is built differently from the literary English sentence. French tolerates — and at the highest register prefers — long subordinate clauses, deeply embedded relatives, parenthetical insertions, and *hypotaxis* (the architecture of subordination) over the *parataxis* (sequenced independent clauses) of plainer English prose. The student who writes French in short flat sentences writes accurate French but not literary French. This module trains the literary sentence: how to build it, how to read it, how to know when its complexity serves and when it sprawls.
Outcome
The student can construct, parse, and edit complex French sentences of literary register; identify every clause type and its grammatical relationship to the main clause; use participial constructions and the *gérondif* idiomatically; and write a forty-word sentence that a French reader recognises as well-built rather than sprawling.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you four short simple sentences in French, each on the same subject (a single concrete event — a bookseller closing his shop in the evening). Your task is to combine them into one sustained literary-register sentence of around forty words, using the full range of subordination, relative clauses, and participial constructions available. You then write a parallel version that decomposes the same content into three or four sentences in *register courant* — the same content, the same meaning, the same accuracy, but a different stylistic register. Finally, you write three sentences explaining what each version *does* that the other cannot: what literary hypotaxis communicates that paratactic prose cannot, and vice versa.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum · with Gustave Flaubert Simulacrum
The question
French has four standard registers in writing — *familier* (familiar/colloquial), *courant* (neutral standard), *soutenu* (elevated/formal), *littéraire* (literary). They are recognisable from cues at every level: vocabulary, grammar, syntax, even punctuation. The cultivated writer of French chooses register consciously and holds it consistently throughout a piece. This module is the register system in full, with attention to *le mot juste* — the exact word, neither its cousin nor its neighbour — and to the work of revision through which register-perfect French is achieved. Flaubert Simulacrum joins as guest for the central example: how he revised *Madame Bovary* word by word over five years.
Outcome
The student can identify the register of any French passage from cues on the page; rewrite a passage from one register to another while holding content constant; revise their own writing for register-consistency; and recognise *faux registres* in their own drafts before submitting them.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum and Flaubert Simulacrum together give you a 150-word passage in the *register courant* — neutral standard French, a description of a small-town bookshop on a Sunday morning. Your task is to produce two register-translations: the same content rewritten in *register familier* (as if recounted by the bookseller's nephew to a friend over coffee) and again in *register soutenu* (as it might appear in a literary essay on provincial France). You hold meaning constant; you change register completely. You then write four sentences of commentary identifying the specific lexical and syntactic moves you made for each register-shift.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
A C1 reader of French opens *Le Monde* over breakfast and reads the front-page editorial in fifteen minutes — not because they recognise every word but because they read strategically, inferring meaning from context, registering register and stance, distinguishing fact from opinion, and locating argument structure on the page without having to translate it word by word. This is a learnable skill, taught in writing-only mode through structured silent reading. This module trains the reading skills the Cambridge 9898 Reading paper assesses, in their actual literary form rather than as multiple-choice exercises.
Outcome
The student can read a 600-word French *éditorial* at near-native speed; identify main argument, supporting claims, and the author's stance from the page alone; distinguish fact from opinion and the author's voice from reported voice; and produce a written analysis of any 300-word literary passage that captures structure, register, and stance.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you a 600-word *éditorial* from a recent French newspaper — register *courant* tilting toward *soutenu*, on a current debate. Your task is the triple reading. First, *survol*: two minutes silent reading; then in writing, in two sentences, what is the author arguing and what is their stance? Second, *repérage*: Vaugelas Simulacrum asks four specific questions of fact (a date, a quotation, a comparative claim, a counter-argument acknowledged); locate each in under thirty seconds and quote it. Third, *lecture approfondie*: twenty minutes of close reading; produce a 200-word written analysis of how the author constructs the argument — the discourse markers used, the placement of the strongest evidence, the rhetorical move at the article's hinge.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum · with Voltaire Simulacrum
The question
Translation is the discipline that exposes everything. The student who can write decent original French may still produce wooden translations — because translation requires holding two languages in the head at once and finding the *equivalent* expression in the second, not the *literal* one. Cambridge 9898 does not include translation as a separate paper, but the skill underlies all three: a Reading-paper passage understood word by word is not understood; an essay that sounds *translated* fails the register tests; literary commentary on French texts is impossible without a sense of the gap between the French expression and its English approximation. Voltaire Simulacrum — the eighteenth-century translator of Newton and Shakespeare — joins as guest.
Outcome
The student can translate a 200-word passage of French literary prose into idiomatic English at register-fidelity, and translate a 200-word English passage into French of *bon usage* at the same fidelity.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum and Voltaire Simulacrum together give you two passages: a 200-word excerpt from a French literary essay in *register soutenu*, to be translated into English; and a 200-word excerpt from an English literary essay (Orwell, perhaps), to be translated into French. The two together test both directions of the discipline. You produce both translations in writing, and accompany each with three commentary notes identifying specific translation problems and how you resolved them — at least one *faux ami*, one structural reframing, and one register-fidelity decision per direction.
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
The Cambridge 9898 Writing paper asks for an argumentative or discursive essay of 300-400 words and a narrative or descriptive piece of comparable length. The skills these tasks require — structuring an argument, marshalling evidence, deploying cohesive devices, holding register, and finishing with a conclusion that earns its position — are the skills the cultivated French writer brings to every piece of writing. This final module of the Language strand integrates everything the previous nine modules have built: noun phrase, verb, pronoun, sentence, register, reading, translation, all in the service of the long form. The student writes a complete argumentative essay; Vaugelas Simulacrum critiques it line by line.
Outcome
The student can write a 400-word French argumentative essay structured to the conventions of *bon usage*, with a sustained register, idiomatic cohesive devices, and a conclusion that earns its position.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum gives you a Cambridge-style essay prompt: *"Le numérique a-t-il appauvri ou enrichi la lecture?"* — has the digital impoverished or enriched reading? You write a 400-word argumentative essay in French, structured to the conventions: *amorce, problématique, annonce du plan; développement* in two or three movements; *conclusion* with *ouverture*. You then submit the essay for line-by-line critique. Vaugelas Simulacrum reads with you, marking grammatical errors, register-slips, structural weaknesses, and places where the cohesive devices have been over- or under-deployed. You produce a revised second version that addresses every comment.
Your goals