The Devil´s Pool E-Book

George (Amandine Lupin) Sand

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Women Writers of the World
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 192

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

George Sand is the pseudonym of Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant. This great French writer was born in Paris in 1804 and passed away in Nohant in 1876. "La Mare au Diable" (The Devil's Pool) is one of her most well-known works. The main character of The Devil's Pool is a widowed farmer who, after the death of his wife, has to raise three young children. Despite his reluctance, he accepts the idea of courting a wealthy widow, Catherine Leonard, in a neighboring region. From there, a plot unfolds that captivates the reader. Deservedly, The Devil's Pool is part of the famous collection: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

Leseprobe

George Sand

THE DEVIL’S POOL

Original Title:

“La Mare au Diable”

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

THE DEVIL’S POOL

I - The Tillage of the Soil

II -  Father Maurice

III - Germain, the Skilled Husbandman

IV - Mother Guillette

V - Petit-Pierre

VI - On the Heath

VII - Underneath the Big Oaks

VIII - The Evening Prayer

IX - Despite the Cold

X - Beneath the Stars

XI - The Belle of the Village

XII - The Master

XIII - The Old Woman

XIV - The Return to the Farm

XV - Mother Maurice

XVI - Little Marie

APPENDIX

I - A Country Wedding

II - The Wedding Favors

III - The Wedding

IV - The Cabbage

INTRODUCTION

Amandina Lucia

1804 – 1876

George Sand is the pseudonym of Amandina Lúcia Aurora Lupin, Baroness Dudevant. This great French writer was born in Paris in 1804 and died in Nohaut in 1876.

George Sand was a novelist and freethinker whose fiction works with bucolic themes made her as famous as her lifestyle. She chose a male name as her pseudonym, often wore male clothing, and would frequently ask people to address her as "mon frère" (my brother). She was also an unusual author for her time, as her work was read indiscriminately by both men and women.

At the age of 18, Sand married a much older baron, with whom she had two children. The marriage was deeply unhappy. She left her husband and children nine years later to live in Paris.

She began her career by writing articles for publications such as Le Figaro. Her first novel, "Rose et Blanche," was published under the name Jules Sand, written in collaboration with her lover at the time, Jules Sandeau.

Sand became as famous for her love affairs as for her work. She revolted against the institution of marriage and believed in free love. Her most well-known affair was with the composer Frédéric Chopin. The book "Un Hiver à Majorque" recounts their months together on the island. Her works and the way she chose to live were instrumental in the emergence of women's emancipation in France.

About the work:

"The Devil's Pool" is a work that stands out not only for its captivating plot but also for its thematic richness and detailed portrayal of nineteenth-century rural life. The protagonist, a widowed farmer, represents not only the daily struggle for survival but also the search for a second chance at love. His journey towards a new union leads him to confront not only social expectations but also his own feelings of loneliness and desire for companionship.

The striking presence of the pool, an almost mystical element in the narrative, adds a layer of symbolism and depth to the story. This natural setting not only serves as a meeting point for the characters but also represents a space of introspection and connection with nature, where hidden truths are revealed and emotional bonds are strengthened.

Furthermore, the relationship between the protagonist and Marie, the young shepherdess, is a central element of the plot, exploring themes such as love, loyalty, and overcoming adversity. The dynamics between the characters are skillfully crafted, offering the reader an emotionally rich and complex experience.

By being included in the renowned list "1001 Books to Read Before You Die," "The Devil's Pool" gains prominence as a work that not only entertains but also prompts reflections on human nature, moral values, and the pursuit of happiness. It is a testament to the author's ability to create timeless narratives that continue to resonate with audiences even centuries after their publication.

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 only, where Lazarus, lying on a dunghill at the rich man’s door, declares that the specter has no terrors for him; probably because he has nothing to lose and his existence is already a life in death.

Is there comfort in this stoical thought of the half-pagan Christianity of the Renaissance and does it satisfy religious souls? The upstart, the rogue, the tyrant, the rake and all those haughty sinners who make an ill use of life and whose steps are dogged by Death, will be surely punished; but can the reflection that death is no evil make amends for the long hardships of the blind man, the beggar, the madman and the poor peasant? No! An inexorable sadness, an appalling fatality brood over the artist’s work. It is like a bitter curse, hurled against the fate of humanity.

Holbein’s faithful delineation of the society in which he lived is, indeed, painful satire. His attention was engrossed by crime and calamity; but what shall we, who are artists of a later date, portray? Shall we look to find the reward of the human beings of to-day in the contemplation of death and shall we invoke it as the penalty of unrighteousness and the compensation of suffering?

No, henceforth, our business is not with death but with life. We believe no longer in the nothingness of the grave, nor in safety bought with the price of a forced renunciation; life must be enjoyed in order to be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor need no longer exult in the death of the rich. All must be made happy, that the good fortune of a few may not be a crime and a curse. As the laborer sows his wheat, he must know that he is helping forward the work of life, instead of rejoicing that Death walks at his side. We may no longer consider death as the chastisement of prosperity or the consolation of distress, for God has decreed it neither as the punishment nor the compensation of life. Life has been blessed by Him and it is no longer permissible for us to leave the grave as the only refuge for those whom we are unwilling to make happy.

There are some artists of our own day, who, after a serious survey of their surroundings, take pleasure in painting misery, the sordidness of poverty and the dunghill of Lazarus. This may belong to the domain of art and philosophy; but by depicting poverty as so hideous, so degraded and sometimes so vicious and criminal, do they gain their end and is that end as salutary as they would wish? We dare not pronounce judgment. They may answer that they terrify the unjust rich man by pointing out to him the yawning pit that lies beneath the frail covering of wealth; just as in the time of the Dance of Death, they showed him his gaping grave and Death standing ready to fold him in an impure embrace. Now, they show him the thief breaking open his doors and the murderer stealthily watching his sleep. We confess we cannot understand how we can reconcile him to the human nature he despises or make him sensible of the sufferings of the poor wretch whom he dreads, by showing him this wretch in the guise of the escaped convict or the nocturnal burglar. The hideous phantom Death, under the repulsive aspect in which he has been represented by Holbein and his predecessors, gnashing his teeth and playing the fiddle, has been powerless to convert the wicked and console their victims. And does not our literature employ the same means as the artists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance?

The revelers of Holbein fill their glasses in a frenzy to dispel the idea of Death, who is their cup-bearer, though they do not see him. The unjust rich of our own day demand cannon and barricades to drive out the idea of an insurrection of the people which Art shows them as slowly working in the dark, getting ready to burst upon the State. The Church of the Middle Ages met the terrors of the great of the earth with the sale of indulgences. The government of to-day soothes the uneasiness of the rich by exacting from them large sums for the support of policemen, jailors, bayonets and prisons.

Albert Durer, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Callot and Goya have made powerful satires on the evils of their times and countries and their immortal works are historical documents of unquestionable value. We shall not refuse to artists the right to probe the wounds of society and lay them bare to our eyes; but is the only function of art still to threaten and appall? In the literature of the mysteries of iniquity, which talent and imagination have brought into fashion, we prefer the sweet and gentle characters, which can attempt and effect conversions, to the melodramatic villains, who inspire terror; for terror never cures selfishness but increases it.

We believe that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love, that the novel of to-day should take the place of the parable and the fable of early times and that the artist has a larger and more poetic task than that of suggesting certain prudential and conciliatory measures for the purpose of diminishing the fright caused by his pictures. His aim should be to render attractive the objects he has at heart and if necessary, I have no objection to his embellishing them a little. Art is not the study of positive reality but the search for ideal truth and the “Vicar of Wakefield” was a more useful and healthy book than the “Paysan Perverti,” or the “Liaisons Dangereuses.”

Forgive these reflections of mine, kind reader and let them stand as a preface, for there will be no other to the little story I am going to relate to you. My tale is to be so short and so simple, that I felt obliged to make you my apologies for it beforehand, by telling you what I think of the literature of terror.

I have allowed myself to be drawn into this digression for the sake of a laborer; and it is the story of a laborer which I have been meaning to tell you and which I shall now tell you at once.

(Ornament)

THE DEVIL’S POOL

I - The Tillage of the Soil

I had just been looking long and sadly at Holbein’s plowman and was walking through the fields, musing on rustic life and the destiny of the husbandman. It is certainly tragic for him to spend his days and his strength delving in the jealous earth, that so reluctantly yields up her rich treasures when a morsel of coarse black bread, at the end of the day’s work, is the sole reward and profit to be reaped from such arduous toil. The wealth of the soil, the harvests, the fruits, the splendid cattle that grow sleek and fat in the luxuriant grass, are the property of the few and but instruments of the drudgery and slavery of the many. The man of leisure seldom loves, for their own sake, the fields and meadows, the landscape or the noble animals which are to be converted into gold for his use. He comes to the country for his health or for change of air but goes back to town to spend the fruit of his vassal’s labor.

On the other hand, the peasant is too abject, too wretched and too fearful of the future to enjoy the beauty of the country and the charms of pastoral life. To him, also, the yellow harvest-fields, the rich meadows, the fine cattle represent bags of gold; but he knows that only an infinitesimal part of their contents, insufficient for his daily needs, will ever fall to his share. Yet year by year he must fill those accursed bags, to please his master and buy the right of living on his land in sordid wretchedness.

Yet nature is eternally young, beautiful and generous. She pours forth poetry and beauty on all creatures and all plants that are allowed free development. She owns the secret of happiness, of which no one has ever robbed her. The happiest of men would be he who, knowing the full meaning of his labor, should, while working with his hands, find his happiness and his freedom in the exercise of his intelligence and having his heart in unison with his brain, should at once understand his own work and love that of God. The artist has such delights as these in contemplating and reproducing the beauties of nature; but if his heart be true and tender, his pleasure is disturbed when he sees the miseries of the men who people this paradise of earth. True happiness will be theirs when mind, heart and hand shall work in concert in the sight of Heaven and there shall be a sacred harmony between God’s goodness and the joys of his creatures. Then, instead of the pitiable and frightful figure of Death stalking, whip in hand, across the fields, the painter of allegories may place beside the peasant a radiant angel, sowing the blessed grain broadcast in the smoking furrow.

The dream of a serene, free, poetic, laborious and simple life for the tiller of the soil is not so impossible that we should banish it as a chimera. The sweet, sad words of Virgil: “Oh, happy the peasants of the field, if they knew their own blessings!” is a regret but, like all regrets, it is also a prophecy. The day will come when the laborer too may be an artist and may at least feel what is beautiful, if he cannot express it, — a matter of far less importance. Do not we know that this mysterious poetic intuition is already his, in the form of instinct and vague reverie? Among those peasants who possess some of the comforts of life and whose moral and intellectual development is not entirely stifled by extreme wretchedness, pure happiness that can be felt and appreciated exists in the elementary stage; and moreover, since poets have already raised their voices out of the lap of pain and of weariness, why should we say that the labor of the hands excludes the working of the soul? Without doubt this exclusion is the common result of excessive toil and of deep misery; but let it not be said that when men shall work moderately and usefully there will be nothing but bad workers and bad poets. The man who draws in noble joy from the poetic feeling is a true poet, though he has never written a verse all his life.

My thoughts had flown in this direction, without my perceiving that my confidence in the capacity of man for education was strengthened by external influences. I was walking along the edge of a field, which some peasants were preparing to sow. The space was vast as that in Holbein’s picture; the landscape, too, was vast and framed in a great sweep of green, slightly reddened by the approach of autumn. Here and there in the great russet field, slender rivulets of water left in the furrows by the late rains sparkled in the sunlight like silver threads. The day was clear and mild and the soil, freshly cleft by the plowshare, sent up a light steam. At the other extremity of the field, an old man, whose broad shoulders and stern face recalled Holbein’s plowman but whose clothes carried no suggestion of poverty, was gravely driving his plow of antique shape, drawn by two placid oxen, true patriarchs of the meadow, tall and rather thin, with pale yellow coats and long, drooping horns. They were those old workers who, through long habit, have grown to be brothers, as they are called in our country and who, when one loses the other, refuse to work with a new comrade and pine away with grief. People who are unfamiliar with the country call the love of the ox for his yoke-fellow a fable. Let them come and see in the corner of the stable one of these poor beasts, thin and wasted, restlessly lashing his lean flanks with his tail, violently breathing with mingled terror and disdain on the food offered him, his eyes always turned toward the door, scratching with his hoof the empty place at his side, sniffing the yokes and chains which his fellow used to wear and incessantly calling him with melancholy lowings. The ox-herd will say: “There is a pair of oxen gone; this one will work no more, for his brother is dead. We ought to fatten him for the market but he will not eat and will soon starve himself to death.”

The old laborer worked slowly, silently and without waste of effort His docile team were in no greater haste than he; but, thanks to the undistracted steadiness of his toil and the judicious expenditure of his strength, his furrow was as soon plowed as that of his son, who was driving, at some distance from him, four less vigorous oxen through a more stubborn and stony piece of ground.

My attention was next caught by a fine spectacle, a truly noble subject for a painter. At the other end of the field a fine-looking youth was driving a magnificent team of four pairs of young oxen, through whose somber coats glanced a ruddy, glow-like flame. They had the short, curly heads that belong to the wild bull, the same large, fierce eyes and jerky movements; they worked in an abrupt, nervous way that showed how they still rebelled against the yoke and goad and trembled with anger as they obeyed the authority so recently imposed. They were what is called “newly yoked” oxen. The man who drove them had to clear a corner of the field that had formerly been given up to pasture and was filled with old tree-stumps; and his youth and energy and his eight half-broken animals, hardly sufficed for the Herculean task.

A child of six or seven years old, lovely as an angel, wearing round his shoulders, over his blouse, a sheepskin that made him look like a little Saint John the Baptist out of a Renaissance picture, was running along in the furrow beside the plow, pricking the flanks of the oxen with a long, light goad but slightly sharpened. The spirited animals quivered under the child’s light touch, making their yokes and head-bands creak and shaking the pole violently. Whenever a root stopped the advance of the plowshare, the laborer would call every animal by name in his powerful voice, trying to calm rather than to excite them; for the oxen, irritated by the sudden resistance, bounded, pawed the ground with their great cloven hoofs and would have jumped aside and dragged the plow across the fields, if the young man had not kept the first four in order with his voice and goad, while the child controlled the four others. The little fellow shouted too but the voice which he tried to make of terrible effect, was as sweet as his angelic face. The whole scene was beautiful in its grace and strength; the landscape, the man, the child, the oxen under the yoke; and in spite of the mighty struggle by which the earth was subdued, a deep feeling of peace and sweetness reigned over all. Each time that an obstacle was surmounted and the plow resumed its even, solemn progress, the laborer, whose pretended violence was but a trial of his strength and an outlet for his energy, instantly regained that serenity which is the right of simple souls and looked with fatherly pleasure toward his child, who turned to smile back at him. Then the young father would raise his manly voice in the solemn and melancholy chant that ancient tradition transmits, not indeed to all plowmen indiscriminately but to those who are most perfect in the art of exciting and sustaining the spirit of cattle while at work. This song, which was probably sacred in its origin and to which mysterious influences must once have been attributed, is still thought to possess the virtue of putting animals on their mettle, allaying their irritation and of beguiling the weariness of their long, hard toil. It is not enough to guide them skillfully, to trace a perfectly straight furrow and to lighten their labor by raising the plowshare or driving it into the earth; no man can be a consummate husbandman who does not know how to sing to his oxen and that is an art that requires taste and especial gifts.

To tell the truth, this chant is only a recitative, broken off and taken up at pleasure. Its irregular form and its intonations that violate all the rules of musical art make it impossible to describe.

But it is none the less a noble song and so appropriate is it to the nature of the work it accompanies, to the gait of the oxen, to the peace of the fields and to the simplicity of the men who sing it, that no genius unfamiliar with the tillage of the earth and no man except an accomplished laborer of our part of the country, could repeat it. At the season of the year when there is no work or stir a foot except that of the plowman, this strong, sweet refrain rises like the voice of the breeze, to which the key it is sung in gives it some resemblance. Each phrase ends with a long trill, the final note of which is held with incredible strength of breath and rises a quarter of a tone, sharping systematically. It is barbaric but possesses an unspeakable charm and anybody, once accustomed to hear it, cannot conceive of another song taking its place at the same hour and in the same place, without striking a discord.