less accurate than
what I have since derived from ordinary photographs. We could no
longer keep count in the family (when my great-aunt tried to frame an
indictment of my grandmother) of all the armchairs she had presented
to married couples, young and old, which on a first attempt to sit down
upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipient.
But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too
closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still
be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past. And
even what in such pieces supplied a material need, since it did so in a
manner to which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as
one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a
metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our
modern tongue. In precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George
Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms
of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use
and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.
And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as
she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or
some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on
the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys
through the realms of time.

Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen _Francois le Champi_, whose
reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality
in my eyes and a mysterious attraction. 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 rhyth