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And we must confess that, even in Little Fadette, The Devil's Pool, and Francois le Champi, it deals with human experience in a mode differing widely from that which the author of Eugenie Grandet considered conform to truth. As regards the methods of these two rivals, the claim to superior truth cannot be settled in Balzac's favour by merely pointing to his realism.
Equally pleasing, though not aiming at the almost antique simplicity of the Mare au Diable, is the story of François le Champi, the foundling, saved from the demoralization to which lack of the softening influences of home and parental affection predestine such unhappy children, through the tenderness his forlorn condition inspires in a single heart that of Madeline Blanchet, the childless wife, whose own wrongs, patiently borne, have quickened her commiseration for the wrongs of others.
In the second piece I played Mariette, and made a great success. Those rehearsals of the Marquis de Villemer and Francois le Champi have remained in my memory as so many exquisite hours. Madame George Sand was a sweet, charming creature, extremely timid. She did not talk much, but smoked all the time.
The break in her ordinary round of work made by the excitements of active statesmanship was hardly perceptible, and in 1849 Le Champi was followed by La Petite Fadette. La Mare au Diable, George Sand's first tale of exclusively peasant-life, is usually considered her masterpiece in this genre.
This, a dramatic adaptation by herself of her novel, François le Champi, was produced at the Odéon in the winter of 1849. Generally speaking, to make a good play out of a good novel, the playwright must begin by murdering the novel; and here, as in all George Sand's dramatic versions of her romances, we seem to miss the best part of the original.
He was very unceremonious, too, but at the same time he did not like people to be wanting in respect to him. One day an artiste, named Paul Deshayes, who was playing in Francois le Champi, came into the green-room. Prince Napoleon, Madame George Sand, the curator of the library, whose name I have forgotten, and myself were there. This artiste was common, and something of an anarchist.
In this study of a peasant heroine resides such charm as the book possesses, and the attempt was to lead on the author to the productions above alluded to, La Mareau Diable, François le Champi, and La Petite Fadette.
The course of the narrative, where it tended to arouse curiosity or melt to pity, certain modes of expression which disturb or sadden the reader, and which, with a little experience, he may recognise as 'common form' in novels, seemed to me then distinctive for to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself an intoxicating whiff of the peculiar essence of Francois le Champi.
It contained La Mare au Diable, Francois le Champi, La Petite Fadette, and Les Maitres Sonneurs.
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