François the Waif E-Book

George Sand

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 250

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Although sadly neglected in English translation, George Sand was a monumentally important novelist of nineteenth-century France, and her works were better known in her day than those of Victor Hugo. François the Waif (also translated as The Country Waif), considered by many to be her masterpiece, tells the tale of a young orphan who is placed in rural foster care. Presented in a fresh edit of the original English translation, and with helpful annotations, this edition presents the text for a new generation of readers.

Leseprobe

François the Waif

george sand

Translated by jane minot sedgwick

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François the Waif first published in French as François le Champi in 1848

This translation by Jane Minot Sedgwick first published in 1894

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2024

Edited text and Notes © Renard Press Ltd, 2024

Cover design by Will Dady, adapted from Arthur Mackmurdo’s cover for Wren’s City Churches (Kent: G. Allen, 1883)

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prefatory note

François le Champi, a pretty idyll that tells of homely affections, self-devotion, ‘humble cares and delicate fears’, opens a little vista into that Arcadia to which, the poet says, we were all born. It offers many difficulties to the translator. It is a rustic tale, put into the mouths of peasants, who relate it with a primitive simplicity, sweet and full of sentiment in the French, but prone to degenerate into mawkishness and monotony when turned into English. Great care has been taken to keep the English of this version simple and idiomatic, and yet religiously to avoid any breach of faith towards the author. It is hoped that, though the original pure and limpid waters have necessarily contracted some stain by being forced into another channel, they may yet yield refreshment to those thirsty souls who cannot seek them at the fountainhead.

j.m.s.

Stockbridge, January 1894

preface

François le Champi appeared for the first time in the feuilleton of the Journal des débats.* Just as the plot of my story was reaching its development, another more serious development was announced in the first column of the same newspaper. It was the final downfall of the July Monarchy, in the last days of February 1848.*

This catastrophe was naturally very prejudicial to my story, the publication of which was interrupted and delayed, and not finally completed, if I remember correctly, until the end of a month. For those of my readers who are artists, either by profession or instinct, and are interested in the details of the construction of works of art, I shall add to my introduction that, some days before the conversation of which that introduction is the outcome, I took a walk through the Chemin aux Napes. The word nape, which, in the figurative language of that part of the country, designates the beautiful plant called nénufar, or Nymphaea,* is happily descriptive of the broad leaves that lie upon the surface of the water, as a cloth (nappe) upon a table; but I prefer to write it with a single p, and to trace its derivation from napée, thus leaving unchanged its mythological origin.

The Chemin aux Napes, which probably none of you, my dear readers, will ever see, as it leads to nothing that can repay you for the trouble of passing through so much mire, is a breakneck path, skirting along a ditch where, in the muddy water, grow the most beautiful nymphaea in the world, more fragrant than lilies, whiter than camellias, purer than the vesture of virgins, in the midst of the lizards and other reptiles that crawl about the mud and flowers, while the kingfisher darts like living lightning along the banks, and skims with a fiery track the rank and luxuriant vegetation of the sewer.

A child six or seven years old, mounted bareback upon a loose horse, made the animal leap the hedge behind me, and then, letting himself slide to the ground, left his shaggy colt in the pasture, and returned to try jumping over the barrier which he had so lightly crossed on horseback a minute before. It was not such an easy task for his little legs; I helped him, and had with him a conversation similar to that between the miller’s wife and the foundling, related in the beginning of The Waif. When I questioned him about his age, which he did not know, he literally delivered himself of the brilliant reply that he was two years old. He knew neither his own name, nor that of his parents, nor of the place he lived in; all that he knew was to cling on an unbroken colt, as a bird clings to a branch shaken by the storm.

I have had educated several foundlings of both sexes, who have turned out well physically and morally. It is no less certain, however, that these forlorn children are apt, in rural districts, to become bandits, owing to their utter lack of education. Entrusted to the care of the poorest people, because of the insufficient pittance assigned to them, they often practise, for the benefit of their adopted parents, the shameful calling of beggars.* Would it not be possible to increase this pittance on condition that the foundlings shall never beg, even at the doors of their neighbours and friends?

I have also learned by experience that nothing is more difficult than to teach self-respect and the love of work to children who have already begun understandingly to live upon alms.

george sand

Nohant, 20th May 1852

françois the waif

introduction

R——— and i were coming home from our walk by the light of the moon, which faintly silvered the dusky country lanes. It was a mild autumn evening, and the sky was slightly overcast; we observed the resonance of the air peculiar to the season, and a certain mystery spread over the face of nature. At the approach of the long winter sleep, it seems as if every creature and thing stealthily agreed to enjoy what is left of life and animation before the deadly torpor of the frost; and as if the whole creation, in order to cheat the march of time, and to avoid being detected and interrupted in the last frolics of its festival, advanced without sound or apparent motion towards its orgies in the night. The birds give out stifled cries instead of their joyous summer warblings. The cricket of the fields sometimes chirps inadvertently; but it soon stops again, and carries elsewhere its song or its wail. The plants hastily breathe out their last perfume, which is all the sweeter for being more delicate and less profuse. The yellowing leaves now no longer rustle in the breeze, and the flocks and herds graze in silence without cries of love or combat.

My friend and I walked quietly along, and our involuntary thoughtfulness made us silent and attentive to the softened beauty of nature, and to the enchanting harmony of her last chords, which were dying away in an imperceptible pianissimo. Autumn is a sad and sweet andante, which makes an admirable preparation for the solemn adagio of winter.*

‘It is all so peaceful,’ said my friend at last, for, in spite of our silence, he had followed my thoughts as I followed his; ‘everything seems absorbed in a reverie so foreign and so indifferent to the labours, cares and preoccupations of man, that I wonder what expression, what colour and what form of art and poetry human intelligence could give at this moment to the face of nature. In order to explain better to you the end of my inquiry, I may compare the evening, the sky and the landscape, dimmed, and yet harmonious and complete, to the soul of a wise and religious peasant, who labours and profits by his toil, who rejoices in the possession of the life to which he is born, without the need, the longing, or the means of revealing and expressing his inner life. I try to place myself in the heart of the mystery of this natural rustic life – I, who am civilised, who cannot enjoy by instinct alone, and who am always tormented by the desire of giving an account of my contemplation, or of my meditation, to myself and to others.

‘Then, too,’ continued my friend, ‘I am trying to find out what relation can be established between my intelligence, which is too active, and that of the peasant, which is not active enough; just as I was considering a moment ago what painting, music, description, the interpretation of art, in short, could add to the beauty of the autumnal night which is revealed to me in its mysterious silence, and affects me in some magical and unknown way.’

‘Let us see,’ said I, ‘how your question is put. This October night, this colourless sky, this music without any distinct or connected melody, this calm of nature, and the peasant who by his very simplicity is more able than we to enjoy and understand it, though he cannot portray it – let us put all this together and call it primitive life, with relation to our own highly developed and complicated life, which I shall call artificial life. You are asking what possible connection or direct link can there be between these two opposite conditions in the existence of persons and things; between the palace and the cottage, between the artist and the universe, between the poet and the labourer.’

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘and let us be exact: between the language spoken by nature, primitive life, and instinct, and that spoken by art, science – in a word, by knowledge.’

‘To answer in the language you have adopted, I should say that the link between knowledge and sensation is feeling.’

‘It is about the definition of feeling that I am going to question you and myself, for its mission is the interpretation which is troubling me. It is the art or artist, if you prefer, empowered to translate the purity, grace and charm of the primitive life to those who only live the artificial life, and who are, if you will allow me to say so, the greatest fools in the world in the presence of nature and her divine secrets.’

‘You are asking nothing less than the secret of art, and you must look for it in the breast of God. No artist can reveal it, for he does not know it himself, and cannot give an account of the sources of his own inspiration or his own weakness. How shall one attempt to express beauty, simplicity and truth? Do I know? And can anybody teach us? No, not even the greatest artists, because if they tried to do so they would cease to be artists, and would become critics; and criticism—’

‘And criticism,’ rejoined my friend, ‘has been revolving for centuries about the mystery without understanding it. But, excuse me, that is not exactly what I meant. I am still more radical at this moment, and call the power of art in question. I despise it, I annihilate it, I declare that art is not born, that it does not exist; or, if it has been, its time is past. It is exhausted, it has no more expression, no more breath of life, no more means to sing of the beauty of truth. Nature is a work of art, but God is the only artist that exists, and man is but an arranger in bad taste. Nature is beautiful, and breathes feeling from all her pores; love, youth, beauty are in her imperishable. But man has but foolish means and miserable faculties for feeling and expressing them. He had better keep aloof, silent and absorbed in contemplation. Come, what have you to say?’

‘I agree, and am quite satisfied with your opinion,’ I answered.

‘Ah!’ he cried, ‘you are going too far, and embrace my paradox too warmly. I am only pleading, and want you to reply.’

‘I reply, then, that a sonnet of Petrarch has its relative beauty, which is equivalent to the beauty of the water of Vaucluse; that a fine landscape of Ruysdael has a charm which equals that of this evening; that Mozart sings in the language of men as well as Philomel in that of birds;* that Shakespeare delineates passions, emotions, and instincts as vividly as the actual primitive man can experience them. This is art and its relativeness – in short, feeling.’

‘Yes, it is all a work of transformation! But suppose that it does not satisfy me? Even if you were a thousand times in the right according to the decrees of taste and aesthetics, what if I think Petrarch’s verses less harmonious than the roar of the waterfall, and so on? If I maintain that there is in this evening a charm that no one could reveal to me unless I had felt it myself; and that all Shakespeare’s passion is cold in comparison with that I see gleaming in the eyes of a jealous peasant who beats his wife, what should you have to say? You must convince my feeling. And if it eludes your examples and resists your proofs? Art is not an invincible demonstrator, and feeling not always satisfied by the best definition.’

‘I have really nothing to answer except that art is a demonstration of which nature is the proof; that the pre-existing fact of the proof is always present to justify or contradict the demonstration, which nobody can make successfully unless he examine the proof with religious love.’

‘So the demonstration could not do without the proof; but could the proof do without the demonstration?’

‘No doubt God could do without it; but, although you are talking as if you did not belong to us, I am willing to wager that you would understand nothing of the proof if you had not found the demonstration under a thousand forms in the tradition of art, and if you were not yourself a demonstration constantly acting upon the proof.’

‘That is just what I am complaining of. I should like to rid myself of this eternal irritating demonstration; to erase from my memory the teachings and the forms of art; never to think of painting when I look at a landscape, of music when I listen to the wind, or of poetry when I admire and take delight in both together. I should like to enjoy everything instinctively, because I think that the cricket which is singing just now is more joyous and ecstatic than I.’

‘You complain, then, of being a man?’

‘No; I complain of being no longer a primitive man.’

‘It remains to be known whether he was capable of enjoying what he could not understand.’

‘I do not suppose that he was similar to the brutes, for as soon as he became a man he thought and felt differently from them. But I cannot form an exact idea of his emotions, and that is what bothers me. I should like to be what the existing state of society allows a great number of men to be from the cradle to the grave – I should like to be a peasant; a peasant who does not know how to read, whom God has endowed with good instincts, a serene organisation and an upright conscience; and I fancy that in the sluggishness of my useless faculties, and in the ignorance of depraved tastes, I should be as happy as the primitive man of Jean-Jacques’s dreams.’*

‘I, too, have had this same dream; who has not? But, even so, your reasoning is not conclusive, for the most simple and ingenuous peasant may still be an artist; and I believe even that his art is superior to ours. The form is different, but it appeals more strongly to me than all the forms which belong to civilisation. Songs, ballads and rustic tales say in a few words what our literature can only amplify and disguise.’

‘I may triumph, then?’ resumed my friend. ‘The peasant’s art is the best, because it is more directly inspired by nature by being in closer contact with her. I confess I went to extremes in saying that art was good for nothing; but I meant that I should like to feel after the fashion of the peasant, and I do not contradict myself now. There are certain Breton laments, made by beggars, which in three couplets are worth all Goethe and Byron put together, and which prove that appreciation of truth and beauty was more spontaneous and complete in such simple souls than in our most distinguished poets. And music, too! Is not our country full of lovely melodies? And though they do not possess painting as an art, they have it in their speech, which is a hundred times more expressive, forcible and logical than our literary language.’

‘I agree with you,’ said I, ‘especially as to this last point. It drives me to despair that I am obliged to write in the language of the Academy,* when I am much more familiar with another tongue infinitely more fitted for expressing a whole order of emotions, thoughts and feelings.’

‘Oh, yes!’ said he, ‘that fresh and unknown world is closed to modern art, and no study can help you to express it even to yourself, with all your sympathies for the peasant, if you try to introduce it into the domain of civilised art and the intellectual intercourse of artificial life.’

‘Alas!’ I answered, ‘this thought has often disturbed me. I have myself seen and felt, in common with all civilised beings, that primitive life was the dream and ideal of all men and all times. From the shepherds of Longus down to those of Trianon,* pastoral life has been a perfumed Eden, where souls wearied and harassed by the tumult of the world have sought a refuge. Art, which has always flattered and fawned upon the too fortunate among mankind, has passed through an unbroken series of pastorals. And under the title of The History of Pastorals I have often wished to write a learned and critical work, in which to review all the different rural dreams to which the upper classes have so fondly clung.

‘I should follow their modifications, which are always in inverse relation to the depravity of morals, for they become innocent and sentimental in proportion as society is shameless and corrupt. I should like to order this book of a writer better qualified than I to accomplish it, and then I should read it with delight. It should be a complete treatise on art; for music, painting, architecture, literature in all its forms, the theatre, poetry, romances, eclogues, songs, fashions, gardens, and even dress, have been influenced by the infatuation for the pastoral dream. All the types of the golden age, the shepherdesses of Astraea,* who are first nymphs and then marchionesses, and who pass through the Lignon of Florian,* wear satin and powder under Louis XV, and are put into sabots* by Sedaine* at the end of the monarchy, are all more or less false, and seem to us today contemptible and ridiculous. We have done with them, and see only their ghosts at the opera; and yet they once reigned at court and were the delight of kings, who borrowed from them the shepherd’s crook and scrip.

‘I have often wondered why there are no more shepherds, for we are not so much in love with the truth lately that art and literature can afford to despise the old conventional types rather than those introduced by the present mode. Today we are devoted to force and brutality, and on the background of these passions we embroider decorations horrible enough to make our hair stand on end if we could take them seriously.’

‘If we have no more shepherds,’ rejoined my friend, ‘and if literature has changed one false ideal for another, is it not an involuntary attempt of art to bring itself down to the level of the intelligence of all classes? Does not the dream of equality afloat in society impel art to a fierce brutality in order to awaken those instincts and passions common to all men, of whatever rank they may be? Nobody has as yet reached the truth. It exists no more in a hideous realism than in an embellished idealism; but there is plainly a search for it, and if the search is in the wrong direction, the eagerness of the pursuit is only quickened. Let us see: the drama, poetry and the novel have thrown away the shepherd’s crook for the dagger, and when rustic life appears on the scene it has a stamp of reality which was wanting in the old pastorals. But there is no more poetry in it, I am sorry to say; and I do not yet see the means of reinstating the pastoral ideal without making it either too gaudy or too sombre. You have often thought of doing it, I know; but can you hope for success?’

‘No,’ I answered, ‘for there is no form for me to adopt, and there is no language in which to express my conception of rustic simplicity. If I made the labourer of the fields speak as he does speak, it would be necessary to have a translation on the opposite page for the civilised reader; and if I made him speak as we do, I should create an impossible being, in whom it would be necessary to suppose an order of ideas which he does not possess.’

‘Even if you made him speak as he does speak, your own language would constantly make a disagreeable contrast; and in my opinion you cannot escape this criticism. You describe a peasant girl, call her Jeanne, and put into her mouth words which she might possibly use. But you, who are the writer of the novel, and are anxious to make your readers understand your fondness for painting this kind of type – you compare her to a druidess, to a Jeanne d’Arc, and so on. Your opinions and language make an incongruous effect with hers, like the clashing of harsh colours in a picture; and this is not the way fully to enter into nature, even if you idealise her. Since then you have made a better and more truthful study in The Devil’s Pool.* Still, I am not yet satisfied; the tip of the author’s finger is apparent from time to time; and there are some author’s words, as they are called by Henri Meunier,* an artist who has succeeded in being true in caricature, and who has consequently solved the problem he had set for himself. I know that your own problem is no easier to solve. But you must still try, although you are sure of not succeeding; masterpieces are only lucky attempts. You may console yourself for not achieving masterpieces, provided that your attempts are conscientious.’

‘I am consoled beforehand,’ I answered, ‘and I am willing to begin again whenever you wish; please give me your advice.’

‘For example,’ said he, ‘we were present last evening at a rustic gathering at the farm, and the hemp-dresser told a story until two o’clock in the morning. The priest’s servant helped him with his tale, and resumed it when he stopped; she was a peasant woman of some slight education; he was uneducated, but happily gifted by nature and endowed with a certain rude eloquence. Between them they related a true story, which was rather long, and like a simple kind of novel. Can you remember it?’

‘Perfectly, and I could repeat it word for word in their language.’

‘But their language would require a translation; you must write in your own, without using a single word unintelligible enough to necessitate a footnote for the reader.’

‘I see that you are setting an impossible task for me – a task into which I have never plunged without emerging dissatisfied with myself, and overcome with a sense of my own weakness.’

‘No matter, you must plunge in again, for I understand you artists; you need obstacles to rouse your enthusiasm, and you never do well what is plain and easy to you. Come, begin, tell me the story of the “Waif”, but not in the way that you and I heard it last night. That was a masterly piece of narrative for you and me who are children of the soil. But tell it to me as if you had on your right hand a Parisian speaking the modern tongue, and on your left a peasant before whom you were unwilling to utter a word or phrase which he could not understand. You must speak dearly for the Parisian, and simply for the peasant. One will accuse you of a lack of local colour, and the other of a lack of elegance. But I shall be listening too, and I am trying to discover by what means art, without ceasing to be universal, can penetrate the mystery of primitive simplicity, and interpret the charm of nature to the mind.’

‘This, then, is a study which we are going to undertake together?’

‘Yes, for I shall interrupt you when you stumble.’

‘Very well, let us sit down on this bank covered with wild thyme. I will begin; but first allow me to clear my voice with a few scales.’

‘What do you mean? I did not know that you could sing.’

‘I am only speaking metaphorically. Before beginning a work of art, I think it is well to call to mind some theme or other to serve as a type, and to induce the desired frame of mind. So, in order to prepare myself for what you ask, I must recite the story of the dog of Brisquet,* which is short, and which I know by heart.’

‘What is it? I cannot recall it.’

‘It is an exercise for my voice, written by Charles Nodier, who tried his in all possible keys; a great artist, to my thinking, and one who has never received all the applause he deserved, because, among all his varied attempts, he failed more often than he succeeded. But when a man has achieved two or three masterpieces, no matter how short they may be, he should be crowned, and his mistakes should be forgotten. Here is the dog of Brisquet. You must listen.’

Then I repeated to my friend the story of the Bichonne, which moved him to tears, and which he declared to be a masterpiece of style.

‘I should be discouraged in what I am going to attempt,’ said I, ‘for this odyssey of the poor dog of Brisquet, which did not take five minutes to recite, has no stain or blot; it is a diamond cut by the first lapidary in the world – for Nodier is essentially a lapidary in literature. I am not scientific, and must call sentiment to my aid. Then, too, I cannot promise to be brief, for I know beforehand that my study will fail in the first of all requisites, that of being short and good at the same time.’

‘Go on, nevertheless,’ said my friend, bored by my preliminaries.

‘This, then, is the history of François the Champi,’ I resumed, ‘and I shall try to remember the first part without any alteration. It was Monique, the old servant of the priest, who began.’

‘One moment,’ said my severe auditor, ‘I must object to your title. Champi is not French.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ I answered. ‘The dictionary says it is obsolete, but Montaigne* uses it, and I do not wish to be more French than the great writers who have created the language. So I shall not call my story François the Foundling, nor François the Bastard, but François the Champi – that is to say, the Waif, the forsaken child of the fields, as he was once called in the great world, and is still called in our part of the country.’

chapter i

One morning, when Madeleine Blanchet, the young wife of the miller of Cormouer, went down to the end of her meadow to wash her linen in the fountain, she found a little child sitting in front of her washing-board playing with the straw she used as a cushion for her knees. Madeleine Blanchet looked at the child, and was surprised not to recognise him, for the road which runs nearby is unfrequented, and few strangers are to be met with in the neighbourhood.

‘Who are you, my boy?’ said she to the little boy, who turned confidingly towards her, but did not seem to understand her question. ‘What is your name?’ Madeleine Blanchet went on, as she made him sit down beside her, and knelt down to begin to wash.

‘François,’ answered the child.

‘François who?’

‘Who?’ said the child stupidly.

‘Whose son are you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know your father’s name?’

‘I have no father.’

‘Is he dead then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She is over there,’ said the child, pointing to a poor little hovel which stood at the distance of two gunshots from the mill, and the thatched roof of which could be seen through the willows.

‘Oh! I know,’ said Madeleine. ‘Is she the woman who has come to live here, and who moved in last evening?’

‘Yes,’ answered the child.

‘And you used to live at Mers?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You are not a wise child. Do you know your mother’s name, at least?’

‘Yes, it is Zabelle.’

‘Isabelle who? Don’t you know her other name?’

‘No, of course not.’