Treasure Island

Name: Treasure Island
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

L'Île au trésor

Original author

Robert Louis Stevenson

Adapted by

Line by Line Publishing,

Read Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson in French and English, a parallel text graded reader with audio. Available in CEFR levels A2, B1, B2, and C2.

About this book

It begins at a seaside inn called the Admiral Benbow, where a nut-brown old seaman with a sabre scar and a sea-chest takes lodging, pays in gold, and posts a boy to watch for a one-legged sailor. His drunken songs, "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest," terrify the household for months. But it is what waits inside that chest, once he dies, that sets everything after in motion: a packet of papers, an account book, and a map marked with red crosses. On it, an island shaped like a fat dragon standing up, and the place where a dead pirate named Flint buried his gold.

The boy is Jim Hawkins, the innkeeper's son, and when a bluff squire and a steady doctor decide to sail for the treasure, Jim goes with them. The story is his to tell, remembered years on. Aboard the Hispaniola he meets the ship's cook, Long John Silver, hopping nimbly on his crutch "like a bird," his broad face pale and smiling. Everyone takes to him. Jim most of all.

Then, one still evening as the island comes into view, Jim climbs into an apple barrel for a snack, grows drowsy, and hears Silver settle down nearby to talk. Within a dozen words he understands that the lives of every honest man aboard now rest on him alone.

Stevenson wrote a sea adventure that has never stopped feeling like one — the tar and salt of a crowded dock, a blind beggar tapping toward the door, the long menace hidden inside easy warmth. It is a book about a boy learning what men are, out where no one can protect him, and the door it opens is the oldest one there is: a map, a ship, and the question of who can be trusted.

Available editions

Short, concrete sentences for early learners.

3,588 sentences

Longer sentences and a wider vocabulary.

3,588 sentences

Complex sentences and a fuller vocabulary, close to everyday native reading.

3,588 sentences

Original English — The most complex prose — long, intricate sentences, and advanced vocabulary.

3,588 sentences

Read a sample

1. Le vieux loup de mer à l'Amiral Benbow

1. The Old Sea-Dog At The Admiral Benbow

Le chevalier Trelawney, le Dr Livesey et les autres messieurs m’ont demandé d’écrire tout ce que je sais sur l’Île au trésor.

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the other gentlemen asked me to write down everything about Treasure Island.

Ils veulent toute l’histoire, du début jusqu’à la fin.

They want the whole story, from the beginning to the end.

Je ne garderai qu’une seule chose pour moi : l’endroit exact où se trouve l’île.

I will keep back only one thing: where exactly the island is.

Je dois cacher cela parce qu’il y a encore un trésor enterré là-bas.

I must hide that because there is still treasure buried there.

Alors maintenant, je prends ma plume en l’an 17__.

So now I take up my pen in the year 17__.

Je vais revenir au temps où mon père avait l’auberge de l’Amiral Benbow.

I will go back to the time when my father owned the Admiral Benbow inn.

C’était quand le vieux marin au visage brun, avec une grande cicatrice, est venu habiter chez nous pour la première fois.

That was when the old brown sailor with a big scar on his face first came to stay under our roof.

History

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson in English
Adapted by Line by Line Publishing in 2026

Also available in

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