L'Assommoir - Zola
Germinal - Zola
Therese Raquin - Zola
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
Cheri - Colette

But never - never Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris. WhY? Because I had to 'do' it for French 'A' Level (British exam for 18year-olds, originally for university entrance) and we had to learn ALL the terms, in French, for the architectural bits of the cathedral. There's a whole chapter in the book devoted to it. But my memory takes its revenge: can't remember what a flying buttresss is, or a gargoyle, or anything else now. And I found Esmeralda and Claude Frollo the Priest and Phoebus the beautiful young man and even Quasimodo himself so......o.... remote from anything at all, really, certainly in my experience then and now. Give me Emma Bovary any day!

And the poetry of Baudelaire; and Lamartine; and Gautier.......

No, Mary, I've never got round to Proust.... am I ashamed to say? I don't know.

Vive la France!

I like Madame Bovary, too. I also thoroughly enjoyed The Three Musketeers when I read it. (Though I didn't enjoy The Count of Monte Cristo...)

On the other hand, I gave up on Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame - just bored me to death.

More modern - I enjoyed The Outsider and The Plague by Camus.

Another vote for Madame Bovary, one of the few books I've read where the male author really was able to get inside a woman's head.

Mary, you probably read your books in French, but mine is so rusty and, truth be told, was always very feeble despite many years of exposure to the subject at school, where we were hindered by a different teacher each year (always called the French mistress . . . such an exotic term).
Anyway I realise what a limited amount of French writing I have read in translation . . . some Colette, the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, something by Zola, the very funny Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier; probably more I cannot now remember.

How could I have forgotten Colette or Flaubert....I love both their work. Colette wrote an especially fine tribute to her mother, I remember. Flaubert was indeed amazingly skilled at writing from a woman's point of view, --unusual for that era.

Camus' "L'Etranger" is oddly translated into "The Outsider" in the UK. In the US, it's "The Stranger".

Like Veer, I studied French at school. I did this from age 11 to 16 but would not have been able to read a book that was not a translation.
I thought at first I could not say I had read any French books but then some titles from long ago popped up!
"Le Rouge et Le Noir" by Stendhal, some Collette, including "Gigi". Short stories by Guy de Maupassant. I recall "Boule de Suif" which was reworked as a John Wayne movie Stagecoach, I believe!
Then there was "Desiree" by Anne-Marie Selinko, also a film.
The Stendhal was recommended by a work-mate. I don't recall how I came across the others.

I studied Literary History so I've read all the French standard works in translation, from the medieval Roman de la rose to Camus, including snippets of Proust. I studied French at school but I now read French books only in translation, most recently Anna Gavalda's Ensemble c'est tout and Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner (pseudonym for two sisters).

This is sad because I taught elementary French for a semester and once translated Marcel Mauss' Essai sur le don, a short book on economic anthropology but that was because of my knowledge of the subject, not my linguistic prowess. I could perhaps manage to read a book in French with much heavy work, I even started on Gavalda in the original, but it's not worth the effort when I can read so much faster in Swedish or English. I miss my French but it's too late to get it back.

This is way past Bastille Day, but I'll throw in my two cents (or centimes!):

(all translations as I only know about 50 words in French)

"Gigi" - Collette -- Loved it

"Travels in the Orient" (? not sure this is exact) - Flaubert -- his travel diary from his traveling in Egypt, which was considered part of the Orient back then. It's hilarious and fascinating. What people got away with in Egypt back then would make your hair stand on end!! ... Unfortunately his "Madame" book, I loathed. I found Emma very tiresome...for Some Reason, the author just could not drum up any sympathy (in me) for her.

"Three Muskateers" - - Read when I was 12 -- Adored it -- what an adventure!

"Les Miserables" -- Loved it.

"The Hunchback of Notre Dame" -- loved it.
Hugo seems, to me, like a French version of Dickens (whom I love).

"Swann's Way" -- Adored it! I read it one lazy beautiful summer -- the perfect time to read this novel, I think, as the weather helped me "sink right into" it, especially the country settings of the story. But why haven't I read any of the follow-up novels?! Have any of you experienced the same conundrum?

Vive La France!