Reading Order
The Devil's PoolLa Mare au Diable Reading Order
La Mare au Diable (The Devil's Pool, 1846) by George Sand is the first and most widely read of her pastoral novels — a series that also includes François le Champi (1847–48) and La Petite Fadette (1848–49) — and one of the simplest and most beautiful short novels in the French Romantic tradition. The plot is deliberately slight: Germain, a young widower, is persuaded by his father-in-law to court a wealthy farmer's widow, but during the journey he falls in love with Marie, a young shepherdess too poor to be a socially acceptable match. The richness of the novel is not its plot but its texture — the precise evocation of the Berry region of central France where Sand grew up, the agricultural calendar, the local customs (including the night of Saint-Andrew and the wedding ceremonies described in Sand's preface), and the slow, deliberate emotional rhythms of a rural world that Sand saw disappearing around her. The preface, in which Sand discusses Holbein's Dance of Death image and proposes the pastoral novel as an alternative to literature that emphasizes suffering, is one of the essential documents of nineteenth-century literary thought about what fiction is for and who it is for.
Where to start
La Mare au Diable (1846) — the novel is short (about 130 pages in most editions) and can be read in a single sitting. The Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Rana Dasgupta includes the preface, which is essential; the Penguin Classics edition translated by Dawn Eng is also reliable. Read the preface first — Sand's account of Holbein and her theory of pastoral fiction frames the entire novel's purpose.
Complete The Devil's Pool Book List
- 1Buy
La Mare au Diable (The Devil's Pool)
George Sand·1846·First published serially in Le Courrier Français in 1846. The preface, in which Sand discusses Holbein's Dance of Death and her theory of pastoral fiction, was added for the first book edition. - 2Buy
François le Champi
George Sand·1848·The second pastoral novel, about a foundling raised by a miller's wife and their complicated love; Proust recalled hearing his mother read it to him in the famous bedtime scene in Swann's Way. - 3Buy
La Petite Fadette
George Sand·1849·The third pastoral novel, about twin brothers divided by a girl from the village margins; the most structurally complex of the three and the one with the richest treatment of twins and double identity.
The Devil's Pool — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Berry region and why does it matter for Sand?
The Berry is a rural region in central France (now the departments of Cher and Indre) where George Sand grew up at her grandmother's estate of Nohant and which she knew intimately from childhood. She returned to Nohant for most of her adult life — it was her working home, where she wrote most of her novels and maintained her circle of artistic friends — and the Berry landscape, agricultural calendar, dialect, and social customs provide the texture of all her pastoral novels. The specific details in La Mare au Diable — the types of field work, the regional customs around Saint-Andrew's night and weddings, the exact topography of the Berry countryside — are not literary pastoralism (a generic version of rural life) but documentary precision about a specific place. Sand also recorded the Berry dialect in her fiction and was an important early figure in the ethnographic documentation of rural French culture, contributing to the tradition that Frédéric Mistral would extend in Provence with his Félibrige movement. The connection to Berry is also partly political: Sand's pastoral novels are set in a world of small farmers and shepherds, not aristocrats, and the dignity and inner life she gives those characters was a deliberate challenge to the assumption, common in urban French fiction, that rural people were merely scenic background.
How does Sand relate to the French Romantic movement?
George Sand (1804–1876) was one of the central figures of French Romanticism — a friend and sometime lover of Alfred de Musset (their affair was the most famous literary scandal of the 1830s), a close friend of Frédéric Chopin (with whom she had a long relationship at Nohant), and a correspondent and peer of Balzac, Flaubert, and Turgenev. Her early novels (Indiana, 1832; Valentine, 1832; Lélia, 1833) were Romantic in the mode of passionate self-analysis and social critique — they are novels about the impossibility of women's happiness within the institutions of marriage and the social limitations placed on feminine self-expression. The pastoral novels (La Mare au Diable, 1846; François le Champi, 1848; La Petite Fadette, 1849) are a deliberate departure from this Romantic mode: Sand described them as an attempt to write a literature adequate to the rural poor, without sentimentality and without condescension, at a moment when she had been radicalized by the politics of 1848 and was thinking about what a genuinely democratic literature might look like. Flaubert, who disliked Sand's early Romantic novels, was deeply moved by the pastoral novels and by his long correspondence with her, which he published after her death.
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