LA MARE AU DIABLE, la mar o abl ((The Devil's Pool'). The most perfect of the works of George Sand was undoubtedly 'La Mare au Diable' (1846). Its perfection is due to the fact that it escapes most of her char acteristic defects and possesses her finest quali ties in their full maturity. This resulted quite naturally from the choice of a simple plot —'the love a lonely ploughman feels for a poor shep herdess just emerging into womanhood, and a setting laid in the heart of Berri, the country where the author had lived as a child, and to which she had now returned. The characters, simple Berrichon peasants, as well as the coun try, were known to her, therefore, not through an imagination only too easily fired, but through observation and long years of sym pathetic interest. There is consequently a re freshing absence of that impassioned pleading which frequently threw her early works out of artistic focus and gave us threats and tears for facts and blood. Intense individualist that she was, her distrust of the perplexities of so ciety had been re-enforced by her own un happy marriage, and from the first she had with Rousseau and Wordsworth, favored the primitive, the simple soul, close to nature. Here she found warrant for her faith that both man and nature are good. This had been indi cated in many earlier incidental characters, the flower girls in (1833), the country philosopher, Patience, in 'Mauprat) (1837), and the story of the poacher, Mouny-Robin (1841). But throughout that earlier period her
mind had been tense with the social problem. This nervous tension had disappeared with the years, and now among the scenes of her child hood her native genius had its way. There is here a sureness of touch and the sense of being on firmer ground. It is not impossible that in the peasants she also saw the salvation and fu ture of France. Their way of life, their homes, the country roads, the night in the woods about the Devil's Pool are truly and beautifully de scribed, and the idealized peasants themselves are likewise true, at least in the sense that they are psychologically consistent and conform to a healthy ideal. The style is simple, limpid and musical, like a woodland brook. In spite of the seemingly unpremeditated manner of her narration, the author keeps steadily to her story and in construction it is superior to 'Francois le Champi> or Petite Fadette' which followed it. The student of George Sand feels that she had turned with a sense of relief to °these Georgics of France?' as Ste. Beuve aptly called them, and there was some thing undoubtedly fresh and reassuring to readers stirred by the revolutionary spirit of '48 in this new and hopeful portrayal of a realm that promised humanity health, stability and strength. Consult Krenine, Sand' (Vol. III).