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. 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_. Beneath the everyday incidents, the commonplace thoughts and
hackneyed words, I could hear, or overhear, an intonation, a rhythmic
utterance fine and strange. The 'action' began: to me it seemed all the
more obscure because in those days, when I read to myself, I used often,
while I turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to
the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more were
added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was reading to me aloud she
left all the love-scenes out.
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