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THE ROMANCISTS

GEORGE SAND

THE DEVIL'S POOL

BIBLIOTH?QUE DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE

DU ROMAN CONTEMPORAIN

GEORGE SAND

PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, Philadelphia

THIS EDITION OF

THE DEVIL'S POOL

HAS BEEN COMPLETELY TRANSLATED

GEORGE B. IVES

THE ETCHINGS AND DRAWINGS ARE BY

EDMOND RUDAUX

NOTICE

GEORGE SAND.

THE DEVIL'S POOL

In that collection, or rather in that great book, in which Death, playing his part on every page, is the connecting link and the dominant thought, Holbein has marshalled sovereigns, pontiffs, lovers, gamblers, drunkards, nuns, courtesans, brigands, paupers, soldiers, monks, Jews, travellers, the whole world of his day and of ours; and everywhere the spectre of Death mocks and threatens and triumphs. From a single picture only, is it absent. It is that one in which Lazarus, the poor man, lying on a dunghill at the rich man's door, declares that he does not fear Death, doubtless because he has nothing to lose and his life is premature death.

Is that stoicist idea of the half-pagan Christianity of the Renaissance very comforting, and do devout souls find consolation therein? The ambitious man, the rascal, the tyrant, the rake, all those haughty sinners who abuse life, and whom Death holds by the hair, are destined to be punished, without doubt; but are the blind man, the beggar, the madman, the poor peasant, recompensed for their long life of misery by the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! An implacable melancholy, a ghastly fatality, overshadows the artist's work. It resembles a bitter imprecation upon the fate of mankind.

There truly do we find the grievous satire, the truthful picture of the society Holbein had under his eyes. Crime and misfortune, those are what impressed him; but what shall we depict, we artists of another age? Shall we seek in the thought of death the reward of mankind in the present day? Shall we invoke it as the punishment of injustice and the guerdon of suffering?

No, we have no longer to deal with Death, but with Life. We no longer believe either in the nothingness of the tomb or in salvation purchased by obligatory renunciation; we want life to be good because we want it to be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor may no longer rejoice at the death of the rich. All must be happy, so that the happiness of some may not be a crime and accursed of God. The husbandman as he sows his grain must know that he is working at the work of life, and not rejoice because Death is walking beside him. In a word, death must no longer be the punishment of prosperity or the consolation of adversity. God did not destine death as a punishment or a compensation for life; for he blessed life, and the grave should not be a refuge to which it is permitted to send those who cannot be made happy.

Holbein's drunkards fill their glasses in a sort of frenzied desire to put aside the thought of Death, who, unseen by them, acts as their cup-bearer. The wicked rich men of to-day demand fortifications and cannon to put aside the thought of a rising of the Jacquerie, whom art shows them at work in the shadow, separately awaiting the moment to swoop down upon society. The Church of the Middle Ages answered the terrors of the powerful ones of the earth by selling indulgences. The government of to-day allays the anxiety of the rich by making them pay for many gendarmes and jailers, bayonets and prisons.

Albert D?rer, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Callot, Goya, produced powerful satires upon the evils of their age and their country. They are immortal works, historical pages of unquestionable value; we do not undertake, therefore, to deny artists the right to probe the wounds of society and lay them bare before our eyes; but is there nothing better to be done to-day than to depict the terrifying and the threatening? In this literature of mysteries of iniquity, which talent and imagination have made fashionable, we prefer the mild, attractive figures to the villains for dramatic effect. The former may undertake and effect conversions, the others cause fear, and fear does not cure egoism, but increases it.

Reader, pardon these reflections, and deign to accept them by way of preface. There will be no other to the little tale I propose to tell you, and it will be so short and so simple that I felt that I must apologize beforehand by telling you what I think of terrifying tales.

I allowed myself to be drawn into this digression apropos of a ploughman. It is the story of a ploughman that I set out to tell you, and will tell you forthwith.

THE PLOUGHING

I had been gazing for a long time and with profound sadness at Holbein's ploughman, and I was walking in the fields, musing upon country-life and the destiny of the husbandman. Doubtless it is a depressing thing to consume one's strength and one's life driving the plough through the bosom of the jealous earth, which yields the treasures of its fecundity only under duress, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread at the end of the day is the only reward and the only profit of such laborious toil. The wealth that covers the ground, the crops, the fruit, the proud cattle fattening on the long grass, are the property of a few, and the instruments of fatigue and slavery of the majority. As a general rule, the man of leisure does not love, for themselves, the fields, or the meadows, or the spectacle of nature, or the superb beasts that are to be converted into gold pieces for his use. The man of leisure comes to the country in search of a little air and health, then returns to the city to spend the fruit of his vassal's toil.

The man of toil, for his part, is too crushed, too wretched, and too frightened concerning the future, to enjoy the beauties of the landscape and the charms of rustic life. To him also the golden fields, the lovely meadows, the noble animals, represent bags of crowns, of which he will have only a paltry share, insufficient for his needs, and yet those cursed bags must be filled every year to satisfy the master and pay for the privilege of living sparingly and wretchedly on his domain.

And still nature is always young and beautiful and generous. She sheds poetry and beauty upon all living things, upon all the plants that are left to develop in their own way. Nature possesses the secret of happiness, and no one has ever succeeded in wresting it from her. He would be the most fortunate of men who, possessing the science of his craft and working with his hands, deriving happiness and liberty from the exercise of his intelligent strength, should have time to live in the heart and the brain, to understand his work, and to love the work of God. The artist has enjoyment of that sort in contemplating and reproducing the beauties of Nature; but, when he sees the suffering of the men who people this paradise called the earth, the just, kind-hearted artist is grieved in the midst of his enjoyment. Where the mind, heart, and arms work in concert under the eye of Providence, true happiness would be found, and a holy harmony would exist between the munificence of God and the delights of the human soul. Then, instead of piteous, ghastly Death walking in his furrow, whip in hand, the painter of allegories could place beside the ploughman a radiant angel, sowing the blessed grain in the smoking furrows with generous hand.

And the dream of a peaceful, free, poetical, laborious, simple existence for the husbandman is not so difficult of conception that it need be relegated to a place among chimeras. The gentle, melancholy words of Virgil: "O how happy the life of the husbandman, if he but knew his happiness!" is an expression of regret; but, like all regrets, it is also a prediction. A day will come when the ploughman may be an artist, if not to express,--which will then matter but little, perhaps,--at all events, to feel, the beautiful. Do you believe that this mysterious intuition of poesy does not already exist within him in the state of instinct and vague revery? In those who have a little hoard for their protection to-day, and in whom excess of misery does not stifle all moral and intellectual development, pure happiness, felt and appreciated, is at the elementary stage; and, furthermore, if poets' voices have already arisen from the bosom of sorrow and fatigue, why should it be said that the work of the hands excludes the exercise of the functions of the mind? That exclusion is probably the general result of excessive toil and profound misery; but let it not be said that when man shall work only moderately and profitably, then there will be none but bad workmen and bad poets. He who derives noble enjoyment from the inward sentiment of poesy is a true poet, though he has never written a line in his life.

The old ploughman was working slowly, in silence, without useless expenditure of strength. His docile team seemed in no greater hurry than he; but as he kept constantly at work, never turning aside, and exerting always just the requisite amount of sustained power, his furrow was as quickly cut as his son's, who was driving four less powerful oxen on some harder and more stony land a short distance away.

It happened, therefore, that I had before my eyes a picture in striking contrast with Holbein's, although it might be a similar scene. Instead of a sad old man, a cheerful young man; instead of a team of thin, sorry horses, two yoke of four sturdy, spirited cattle; instead of Death, a lovely child; instead of an image of despair and a suggestion of destruction, a spectacle of energetic action and a thought of happiness.

Then it was that the French quatrain:

"A la sueur de ton visaige," etc.,

But, alas! that man has never understood the mystery of the beautiful, that child will never understand it! God preserve me from the thought that they are not superior to the animals they guide, and that they have not at times a sort of ecstatic revelation that charms away their weariness and puts their cares to sleep! I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord God, for they are born kings of the earth much more truly than they who possess it, because they have paid for it. And the proof that they feel that it is so is found in the fact that you cannot expatriate them with impunity, and that they love the ground watered by the sweat of their brow, that the true peasant dies of homesickness in the uniform of the soldier, far from the fields where he was born. But that man lacks a part of the enjoyments I possess, immaterial enjoyments to which he is abundantly entitled, he the workman in the vast temple which the heavens are vast enough to embrace. He lacks knowledge of his own sentiments. They who condemned him to servitude from his mother's womb, being unable to take from him the power of reverie, have taken the power of reflection.

Ah! well, such as he is, incomplete and doomed to never-ending childhood, he is nobler even so than he in whom knowledge has stifled sentiment. Do not place yourselves above him, you who consider yourselves endowed with the lawful and inalienable right to command him, for that terrible error proves that in you the mind has killed the heart and that you are the most incomplete and the blindest of men!--I prefer the simplicity of his mind to the false enlightenment of yours; and if I had to tell his life, it would be more pleasant for me to bring out its attractive and affecting aspects than it is creditable to you to depict the abject condition to which the scornful rigor of your social precepts may debase him.

I knew that young man and that beautiful child; I knew their story, for they had a story, everybody has his story, and everybody might arouse interest in the romance of his own life if he but understood it. Although a peasant and a simple ploughman, Germain had taken account of his duties and his affections. He had detailed them to me ingenuously one day, and I had listened to him with interest. When I had watched him at work for a considerable time, I asked myself why his story should not be written, although it was as simple, as straightforward, and as devoid of ornament as the furrow he made with his plough.

Next year that furrow will be filled up and covered by a new furrow. Thus the majority of men make their mark and disappear in the field of humanity. A little earth effaces it, and the furrows we have made succeed one another like graves in the cemetery. Is not the furrow of the ploughman as valuable as that of the idler, who has a name, however, a name that will live, if, by reason of some peculiarity or some absurd exploit, he makes a little noise in the world?

P?RE MAURICE

"Germain," his father-in-law said to him one day, "you must make up your mind to marry again. It's almost two years since you lost my daughter, and your oldest boy is seven years old. You're getting on toward thirty, my boy, and when a man passes that age, you know, in our province, he's considered too old to begin housekeeping again. You have three fine children, and thus far they haven't been a trouble to us. My wife and daughter-in-law have looked after them as well as they could, and loved them as they ought. There's Petit-Pierre, he's what you might call educated; he can drive oxen very handily already; he knows enough to keep the cattle in the meadow, and he's strong enough to drive the horses to water. So he isn't the one to be a burden to us; but the other two--we love them, God knows! poor innocent creatures!--cause us much anxiety this year. My daughter-in-law is about lying-in, and she still has a little one in her arms. When the one we expect has come, she won't be able to look after your little Solange, and especially your little Sylvain, who isn't four years old and hardly keeps still a minute day or night. His blood is hot, like yours: he'll make a good workman, but he's a terrible child, and my old woman can't run fast enough now to catch him when he runs off toward the ditch or in among the feet of the cattle. And then, when my daughter-in-law brings this other one into the world, her last but one will be thrown on my wife's hands for a month, at least. So your children worry us and overburden us. We don't like to see children neglected; and when you think of the accidents that may happen to them for lack of watching, your mind's never at rest. So you must have another wife, and I another daughter-in-law. Think it over, my boy. I've already warned you more than once; time flies, and the years won't wait for you. You owe it to your children and to us, who want to have everything go right in the house, to marry as soon as possible."

"Well, father," the son-in-law replied, "if you really want me to do it, I must gratify you. But I don't propose to conceal from you that it will cause me a great deal of annoyance, and that I'd about as lief drown myself. You know what you've lost, and you don't know what you may find. I had an excellent wife, a good-looking wife, sweet and brave, good to her father and mother, good to her husband, good to her children, a good worker, in the fields or in the house, clever about her work, good at everything, in fact; and when you gave her to me, when I took her, it wasn't one of the conditions that I should forget her if I had the bad luck to lose her."

"What you say shows a good heart, Germain," rejoined P?re Maurice; "I know you loved my daughter, that you made her happy, and that if you could have satisfied Death by going in her place, Catherine would be alive at this moment and you in the cemetery. She well deserved to have you love her like that, and if you don't get over her loss, no more do we. But I'm not talking about forgetting her. The good God willed that she should leave us, and we don't let a day pass without showing Him, by our prayers, our thoughts, our words, our acts, that we respect her memory and are grieved at her departure. But if she could speak to you from the other world and tell you her will, she would bid you seek a mother for her little orphans. The question, then, is to find a woman worthy to take her place. It won't be very easy; but it isn't impossible; and when we have found her for you, you will love her as you loved my daughter, because you are an honest man and because you will be grateful to her for doing us a service and loving your children."

"Very good, P?re Maurice," said Germain, "I will do what you wish, as I always have done."

"I must do you the justice to say, my son, that you have always listened to the friendship and sound arguments of the head of your family. So let us talk over the matter of your choice of a new wife. In the first place, I don't advise you to take a young woman. That isn't what you need. Youth is fickle; and as it's a burden to bring up three children, especially when they're the children of another marriage, what you must have is a kind-hearted soul, wise and gentle, and used to hard work. If your wife isn't about as old as yourself, she won't have sense enough to accept such a duty. She will think you too old and your children too young. She will complain, and your children will suffer."

"That is just what disturbs me," said Germain. "Suppose she should hate the poor little ones, and they should be maltreated and beaten?"

"God forbid!" said the old man. "But evil-minded women are rarer in these parts than good ones, and a man must be a fool not to be able to put his hand on the one that suits him."

"True, father: there are some good girls in our village. There's Louise and Sylvaine and Claudie and Marguerite--any one you please, in fact."

"Softly, softly, my boy, all those girls are too young or too poor--or too pretty; for we must think of that, too, my son. A pretty woman isn't always as steady as a plainer one."

"Do you want me to take an ugly one, pray?" said Germain, a little disturbed.

"No, not ugly, for you will have other children by her, and there's nothing so sad as to have ugly, puny, unhealthy children. But a woman still in her prime, in good health and neither ugly nor pretty, would do your business nicely."

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