Sans famille Reading Order

Sans famille (Nobody's Boy, 1878) by Hector Malot is the great French orphan novel — the story of Rémi, a child who discovers at age eight that he is not the son of the peasant woman who has raised him in the Auvergne, and who is sold to Vitalis, an Italian street musician, and walks across France with a troupe of performing animals. Sans famille is the French Dickensian novel par excellence: it combines the sentimental appeal of the imperiled child, the picaresque structure of travel through varied social milieux, and the eventual revelation of true identity and inheritance that characterizes the Dickensian mode. Vitalis — who turns out to be a famous Italian tenor, Carlo Balzani, who fled to obscurity after a career scandal — is a teacher as well as an employer, and the novel is partly a Bildungsroman of Rémi's musical and moral education. The performing animals (Capi the dog, Zerbino and Dolce the other dogs, and Joli-Cœur the monkey) are among the most beloved in French children's literature, and their various fates drive some of the novel's most affecting passages. Sans famille was immediately successful, was translated everywhere, and has never been out of print; it is the French novel most often cited alongside Dickens as an example of the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition at its finest.