The Devil’s Pool

The Devil’s Pool

By George Sand.

Translated by Jane Minot Sedgwick and Ellery Sedgwick.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Notice
4. The Author to the Reader
5. The Devil’s Pool
   1. I: The Tillage of the Soil
   2. II: Father Maurice
   3. III: Germain, the Skilled Husbandman
   4. IV: Mother Guillette
   5. V: Petit-Pierre
   6. VI: On the Heath
   7. VII: Underneath the Big Oaks
   8. VIII: The Evening Prayer
   9. IX: Despite the Cold
   10. X: Beneath the Stars
   11. XI: The Belle of the Village
   12. XII: The Master
   13. XIII: The Old Woman
   14. XIV: The Return to the Farm
   15. XV: Mother Maurice
   16. XVI: Little Marie
   17. Appendix
       1. I: A Country Wedding
       2. II: The Wedding Favors
       3. III: The Wedding
       4. IV: The Cabbage
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Notice

When I wrote The Devil’s Pool, the first of a series of pastoral tales which I meant to bring out together under the title of Tales of a Hemp-Dresser, I had no system in view, and no design of introducing a revolution into literature. No one man has ever effected a revolution; for a revolution, especially in art, is an unconscious change which everybody has had a hand in. But this is not applicable to tales of rustic life, which have always existed, at all times, and under all forms, and have been sometimes pompous, sometimes affected, and sometimes natural. I have said somewhere, and must now repeat, that pastoral life has always been the ideal of cities and of the courts of kings. I have attempted nothing new in following the easy path which brings back civilized man to the charms of primitive life. I have not tried to invent a new language nor to affect a new style, though many newspaper articles have told me so. I understand my own intentions better than anybody else can, and I am continually surprised that criticism should be so far-seeking, when the simplest ideas and most trivial circumstances are all that inspire the creations of art. Especially as regards The Devil’s Pool, as I have related in the introduction, an engraving of Holbein, that had struck me, and a real scene that I had before my eyes at the same time, while the men were sowing the crops, were all that induced me to write the modest story laid among the humble landscapes of my daily walks. If I am asked what I meant to do, I shall answer that I meant to write a very touching and very simple story, and that I have not succeeded to my satisfaction. I have indeed seen and felt the beauty of simplicity, but seeing and describing are not the same thing. The best the artist can hope for is to persuade those who have eyes to see for themselves. Look at what is simple, my kind reader; look at the sky, the fields, the trees, and at what is good and true in the peasants; you will catch a glimpse of them in my book, but you will see them much better in nature.

George Sand.

Nohant, the twelfth of April, 1851.

The Author to the Reader

A la sueur de ton visaige,
Tu gagnerais ta pauvre vie.
Après long travail et usaige,
Voicy la mort qui te convie.1

This quaint old French verse, written under one of Holbein’s pictures, is profoundly melancholy. The engraving represents a laborer driving his plow through the middle of a field. Beyond him stretches a vast horizon, dotted with wretched huts; the sun is sinking behind the hill. It is the end of a hard day’s work. The peasant is old, bent, and clothed in rags. He is urging onward a team of four thin and exhausted horses; the plowshare sinks into a stony and ungrateful soil. One being only is active and alert in this scene of toil and sorrow. It is a fantastic creature. A skeleton armed with a whip, who acts as plowboy to the old laborer, and running along through the furrow beside the terrified horses, goads them on. This is the specter Death, whom Holbein has introduced allegorically into that series of religious and philosophic subjects, at once melancholy and grotesque, entitled “The Dance of Death.”

In this collection, or rather this mighty composition, where Death, who plays his part on every page, is the connecting link and predominating thought, Holbein has called up kings, popes, lovers, gamesters, drunkards, nuns, courtesans, thieves, warriors, monks, Jews, and travelers⁠—all the people of his time and our own; and everywhere the specter Death is among them, taunting, threatening, and triumphing. He is absent from one picture