La mare au diable (Devil's Pool) by George Sand

"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."

"I could help to make Nature fruitful, and sing of her gifts, without ceasing to see with my eyes or understand with my brain harmonious colors and sounds, delicate shades and graceful outlines; in short, the mysterious beauty of all things. And above all, if my heart continued to beat in concert with the divine sentiment that presided over the immortal sublimity of creation."

"I see the seal of the Lord upon their noble brows, for they were born to inherit the earth far more truly than those who have bought and paid for it. The proof that they feel this is that they cannot be exiled with impunity, that they love the soil they have watered with their tears, and that the true peasant dies of homesickness under the arms of a soldier far from his native field."


"Next year that furrow will be filled and covered by a fresh one. Thus disappear most of the footprints made by man in the field of human life. A little earth obliterates them, and the furrows we have dug succeed one another like graves in a cemetery. Is not the furrow of the laborer of as much value as that of the idler, even if that idler, by some absurd chance, have made a little noise in the world, and left behind him an abiding name?"

"And he went away musing as men do whose thoughts are too few to divide into hostile factions, not scraping up fine arguments for rebellion and selfishness but suffering from a dull grief, submissive to ills from which there is no escape."

How simple. No explanations


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I thought this was an adorable story by George Sand. The simplicity of the peasant was so marvelously portrayed. Sand describes the hard life of the peasant, and how he is too practical to be conscious of the beauty around him. "He lacks the consciousness of his sentiment." And yet, if the peasant did recognize the beauty in every leaf, every grain of dirt...would he still be a peasant? I think the peasant does much more than recognize beauty, he lives it. Poets spend all of their time trying to capture beauty, but they are always observers of something that is beyond them. Simple people don't philosophize about it, but just live along with it. There's something so dignifying about this, it is very admirable.
I was slightly disappointed with the character of Marie. I don't know, I always looked up to George Sand, for her strong female characters that aren't all perfect and noble, such as in Lelia. Marie seemed to be just the typical, noble, strong woman that has a correct answer for everything. Those type of characters are annoying, because they don't show any weakness. Weakness is beautiful because it is human. The character was too perfect for my taste. She suddenly became maternal and bold. For instance, I thought her conduct with German was too bold, giving him advice (a grown man) and pretty much ordering him around. And here Germain became like a little boy himself, asking this little girl for advice when she clearly had no experience of family life. His tone was rather annoying too, because he seemed to treat her extremely delicately, like a 5 year old girl, as if he was afraid she would fly into a little girl tantrum. I don't know, this caution was rather odd.

And at the end, when he asked her to marry him, honestly it was just sickening. First of all, he still used the term "little girl", clearly not recognizing her womanhood and the fact that she would be his partner in this marriage. He was talking for her, filling in the words as if she wasn't capable of any thought. "Poor little girl, you have a kind heart, I know;" I was curious whether he even viewed her as a woman in the end. Will she always be a little girl to him?

What I did like about this story was that the narrator, whomever that may be, "recorded" the story of a man that will never be famous. The narrator even says, "He will never know or care, but I shall take pleasure in my talk." How marvelous that is, because German himself doesn't matter, but the story he has to tell- his story will live on. I actually do understand the peasant. Since I am Romanian, I have always heard about the hard life a peasant leads, and yet my what a beautiful world they've created about them. Well, aside from all the drinking, they have such simple and yet tasty foods, dances, and goodness! The peasant language- it is like nothing else! The humor, the stories, the phrases, the richness! And even in Russian literature, one sees the suffering and yet the day to day triumph of the peasant. And so yes, I agree, these stories are worth telling, because actually, if one strips society, one ends up with the most simplistic way of life: which is the peasant's.

Of course I have criticized this book way too much, and it honestly was a very adorable story.

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Translated by Jane Minot Sedgwick and Ellery Sedgwick 1901