François le Champi Reading Order

François le Champi (1847-48, serialized; book 1850) by George Sand is the third and most charming of her rustic Berrichon novels (Berry pastorals), following La Mare au diable (1846) and preceding La Petite Fadette (1849). François le Champi (the orphan boy of the commons) is a foundling raised on a mill farm, who grows up loving the miller's wife Madeleine with an attachment that is first filial and then romantic. The novel is notable in Sand's oeuvre for two things: first, the use of a frame narrative in which the story is told in the local Berrichon dialect by an old peasant to the author and her friend, and this framing device (which Sand herself appears as a character) anticipates the interest in the relationship between the spoken tale and the written novel that would preoccupy later writers; and second, the love of a boy for a woman old enough to be his mother, resolved in marriage after the social obstacles are removed, which is the most direct of Sand's engagements with the Romantic theme of the impossible love that turns out to be possible. François le Champi has an important place in literary history because it appears in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: the narrator's mother reads it aloud to him on a night when he is anxious and cannot sleep, and the novel becomes associated with the tender solace of maternal love.