Novel
The Devil's Pool
La Mare au diable
George Sand · 1846
Opening lines
Le quatrain en vieux français, placé au-dessous d’une composition d’Holbein, est d’une tristesse profonde dans sa naïveté.
The quatrain in Old French, placed beneath a composition by Holbein, is profoundly sad in its simplicity.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Germain, a twenty-eight-year-old ploughman, widowed for two years and the father of three young children, is persuaded by his father-in-law, old Maurice, to go and ask a well-off widow from another village to marry him. He sets out with his youngest son and with Marie, a sixteen-year-old shepherdess who is leaving to take a position in the same area. On the way they lose their path in the woods and spend the night outdoors, beside a pond known as the Mare au Diable.
Context
Written in four days, in the last days of October 1845, the tale appeared in Le Courrier français from 6 to 15 February 1846, then in volume form the same year, with an appendix devoted to country weddings. The first chapter starts from a Holbein engraving in which Death accompanies a ploughman; the author contrasts it with a ploughing scene she saw herself and asserts that art is the search for an ideal truth. The book opens the cycle of her rustic novels, gathered under the title of Les Veillées du chanvreur.
Who it is for
A short novel, extended by a description of peasant weddings in Berry; no preparation is needed.
Prizes and reception
It opens the author's series of rural novels, and it has been translated into English several times since 1847.
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