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Her delicious romance of "Francois le Champi" attracted a new and enthusiastic audience to her, and her entire emancipation from "problems" was marked in the pages of "La Petite Fadette" and of "La Mare au Diable." To the same period belong "Les Visions de la Nuit des les Campagnes," "Les Maitres Sonneurs," and "Cosina."
We do not know her unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole. In order to feel this spirit it is not, indeed, necessary to read all that she ever produced. Even three or four only out of her many books might suffice to show her to us, if they were well chosen; let us say, the Lettres d'un Voyageur, Mauprat, François le Champi, and a story which I was glad to see Mr.
"Mademoiselle, you were charming in Junie," one of them observed; "but you bite your lips, and the Roman women never did that!" "My dear girl," another said, "you were delicious in Francois le Champi, but there is not a single Breton woman in the whole of Brittany with her hair curled."
On the last night of 1870 a meeting of friends at Nohant broke up with the parting words, "All is lost!" "The execrable year is out," writes Madame Sand, "but to all appearances we are entering upon a worse." On the 15th of January, 1871, her little drama François le Champi, first represented in the troublous months of 1849, was acted in Paris for the benefit of an ambulance.
Before he began to write, the movement towards a greater restraint, a more deliberate art, had shown itself in a few short novels by GEORGE SAND the first of the long and admirable series of her mature works where, especially in such delicate masterpieces as La Mare au Diable, La Petite Fadette, and François le Champi, her earlier lyricism and incoherence were replaced by an idyllic sentiment strengthened and purified by an exquisite sense of truth.
Her inspiration thus came from without, throwing out those endless declamatory outbursts which we meet in Consuelo and in Comtesse de Rudolstadt. These theory-novels were soon followed by novels dealing with social problems, now and then relieved by delightful idyllics such as La Mare au Diable and François le Champi. This third tendency M. d'Haussonville considers the least successful.
The days passed by, carrying away with them all our little disappointed hopes, and fresh days dawned bringing fresh dreams, so that life seemed to me eternal happiness. I played in turn in Le Marquis de Villemer and Francois le Champi. In the former I took the part of the foolish baroness, an expert woman of thirty-five years of age. I was scarcely twenty-one myself, and I looked seventeen.
The result was a little stage triumph for Madame Sand. It helped to draw to her pastoral tales the attention they deserved, but had not instantly won in all quarters. Théophile Gautier writes playfully of this piece: "The success of François le Champi has given all our vaudeville writers an appetite for rusticity.
Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen Francois le Champi, whose reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality in my eyes and a mysterious attraction. I had not then read any real novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist. That prepared me in advance to imagine that Francois le Champi contained something inexpressibly delicious.
There are Philistines in her thatched cottages, as well as in her marble halls. Germain, in La Mare au Diable, has some difficulty to discover for himself, as well as to convince his family and neighbors, that in espousing the penniless Marie he is not marrying beneath him in every sense. François le Champi is a pariah, an outcast in the estimation of the rustic world.
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