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Beaumont’s 1756 tale as an A2 adaptation
Beauty and the Beast La bella y la bestia
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
This is not the original text but a retelling: MovaReader wrote this adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy tale in simple Spanish for readers who already recognize the past tenses. The catalog places it at A2: 9 chapters, about 5,000 words and 9 words per sentence on average. The retelling follows the 1756 tale step by step, from a merchant who loses his fortune and a rose from a stranger’s garden to the suppers in the palace in the woods. It is Beaumont’s version, not a later film’s: Beauty has three brothers and two jealous sisters, and the Beast comes to see her every evening at nine.
- A2
- 4 992 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
Earlier
At A1 this will feel tight: the narration runs in the past tenses (vivía, perdió, había pedido), and sentences average 9 words, while The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood keep to 6.
A1A2
This text
Right for A2: the words are mostly frequent, the sentences short, and rare things like a clavecín are explained by the text itself.
Check this passageB1
With room to spare
At B1 the tale reads in about an hour with hardly any help: a light warm-up before the full Spanish texts, which start at B2 in the catalog.
Start readingSentences average 9 words, and the whole story is told in the past: events in the pretérito indefinido, background in the imperfecto, and things further back in the pluscuamperfecto (había perdido, le había pedido). About a third of the words belong to the characters’ lines in angle quotes. A word of 9 letters or more comes up once in 58 words, often a form of a simple verb (temblando, contestaron) or a word that is easy to recognize, like problemas or chocolate, and the rare clavecín is explained by the text itself: El clavecín se parece mucho al piano. No chapter breaks this rhythm: chapter by chapter, the average sentence stays between 8 and 11 words. In vocabulary the tale is close to A1, since Little Red Riding Hood has one long word in 55. But the sentences are longer than in the published A1 adaptations, The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, which have 6 words each, and the whole story rests on the past tenses, so the level is A2. The Don Quixote adaptation at the same level is a little harder, with 10 words per sentence and one long word in 36, and the catalog’s full Spanish texts start at B2, where Unamuno’s Mist has 13 words per sentence. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 4 992
- words
- 9
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
A rich merchant suddenly loses his fortune and moves to the country with his six children. The youngest daughter, whom everyone calls Beauty (Bella in Spanish), gets up at four to do the housework, while her two elder sisters idle about, complain and mock her. When the merchant goes to town on news of a ship, the elder two ask for dresses and rings, and Beauty asks only for a rose. On the way back he gets lost in a snowy forest, spends the night in an empty palace where a table stands ready for him, and in the morning cuts a branch of roses in the garden. Then a terrible Beast appears: the merchant must die unless one of his daughters comes in his place of her own free will. Beauty goes to the palace, and every evening at nine the Beast comes to talk with her over supper. This page does not tell how the tale ends.
Compare two places
La bella y la bestia
VI. Las cenas de las nueve
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Choose an underlined word.
A rose in the past tense
Everything the merchant does is in the pretérito indefinido: se tomó, salió, cortó, oyó, vio. Le había pedido Bella is the pluscuamperfecto, an action further back than the rest: “what Beauty had asked him for”. Vio venir hacia él una bestia: after ver Spanish puts the infinitive, “he saw a beast coming towards him”. Tan horrible que: “so horrible that”. The Beast speaks to the merchant with usted: es usted, le salvé, lo dejé, me lo paga. Robando mis rosas: here the gerund means “by stealing my roses”.
The Beast switches to tú
With the merchant the Beast used usted, but with Beauty he uses tú: ¿me permites?, si te molesto, dímelo. Dímelo is the command di (from decir) plus two pronouns, me “to me” and lo “it”: “tell me”. ¿Verdad que soy muy feo? means “I am very ugly, aren’t I?”. Ser listo means “to be clever”, while estar listo means “to be ready”. In Los tontos nunca saben que lo son the pronoun lo stands for tontos: “fools never know that they are fools”.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
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Reader translates whole sentences, which helps here where several past tenses meet in one sentence, as in Si no pedía nada, ellas iban a decir que lo hacía para ser distinta.
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
No, these are not Beaumont’s own words but an adaptation written by MovaReader. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont published La Belle et la Bête in French in 1756, in her collection Magasin des enfants, and this retelling follows the old English translation of the tale on Project Gutenberg. What differs is the language: instead of eighteenth-century French, this is modern Spanish with short sentences of 9 words on average, past tenses and dialogue in angle quotes, split into 9 chapters. The tale has not been cut down to a few scenes: all its episodes remain in the same order, and a few short lines and scenes that follow from it have been added, such as an evening talk between Beauty and the Beast about life in the country.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no recording: this adaptation exists only as text. Tap a word you do not know and its translation appears beside it; in this tale those will often be things from the palace and the garden, such as rosales, cofre, espejo or baúl.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, but only on the Reader plan, which translates sentences in full. Without it you can still tap single words: the free plan translates them within a daily limit. Sentences here are short, 9 words on average, so a full translation will rarely be needed, perhaps for longer lines such as Me gustaría decirte que sí, pero no quiero mentirte: eso no va a pasar nunca.
How many hours does it take?
About an hour at the pace of someone who still stops at new words: the text has about 5,000 words. A chapter averages about 550 words, or 6-9 minutes, so the tale is easy to read one chapter at a time.
Where does the text get easier?
There is no easier stretch: the difficulty is even, with 8 to 11 words per sentence in each of the 9 chapters. The shortest sentences are in chapter IV, “Una rosa muy cara”, the longest in chapters VII and IX. Chapter III, about the merchant’s night in the palace, has the fewest long words: roughly one in a hundred has 9 letters or more.
Will my place in the book be saved?
It will, once you are signed in: the reader keeps both your place in the tale and the words you looked up. The contents on this page lead straight to any of the 9 chapters, for example VI, “Las cenas de las nueve”, where the Beast first joins Beauty at supper.