The Devil's Pool, by George Sand (Book Club, January '23)

Literature & Writing L&L Book Club
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As far as I can remember, I have never read anything by George Sand (the pen name of French author, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil). But Wikipedia tells me that in the 1830s and 1840s she was more renowned in England than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, and that she is one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era.

Where better to start than with her 1846 title, La Mare au Diable or The Devil’s Pool, the first in a series of four pastoral novels based on the author’s childhood. This rustic novel, set in the French countryside, explores how love can transcend convention and class obstacles.

You can download a copy of the e-book from Project Gutenberg, and a LibriVox audiobook version is also available. But any unabridged edition (paper, digital or audiobook) is fine.

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I started reading The Devil’s Pool over the winter break, and waded through the rather overblown rumination on Death in the opening note from “the author to the reader”. It’s a bit pontificatory (which probably isn’t a word, though it ought to be), but I struggled on until I got to:

Art is not the study of positive reality, but the search for ideal truth, and the “Vicar of Wakefield” was a more useful and healthy book than the “Paysan Perverti,” or the “Liaisons Dangereuses.”

Guess what, gentle reader? I went off to read Liaisons Dangereuses instead, and forgot all about reading The Devil’s Pool.

Dragging myself back to it now, my heart sinks when I see the style of the first chapter. So many adjectives! Maybe it reads better in the original French?

In a translation available on Project Gutenberg, here are the opening words of each of the first four paragraphs in Chapter 1:

I had just been looking long and sadly […]

On the other hand, the peasant is too abject, too wretched, and too fearful of the future […]

Yet nature is eternally young, beautiful, and generous. […]

The dream of a serene, free, poetic, laborious, and simple life […]

Oh, dear.

Nonetheless, I battle on with it, despite the prospect of spending my weekend in a sea of verbiage! Let’s hope the story turns out to be worth it. After all, there must be some reason why George Sand was so revered a writer during her lifetime.

Have you read The Devil’s Pool? What do you think of it?