dent that I have related in the
preface, an engraving of Holbein's that had made an impression upon me,
and a scene from real life that came under my eyes at the same moment,
in sowing time,--those were what impelled me to write this modest tale,
the scene of which is laid amid humble localities that I used to visit
every day. If any one asks me my purpose in writing it, I shall reply
that I desired to do a very simple and very touching thing, and that I
have not succeeded as I hoped. I have seen, I have felt the beautiful in
the simple, but to see and to depict are two different things! The most
that the artist can hope to do is to induce those who have eyes to look
with him. Therefore, my friends, look at simple things, look at the sky
and the fields and the trees and the peasants, especially at what is
good and true in them: you will see them to a slight extent in my book,
you will see them much better in nature.

GEORGE SAND.

NOHANT, _April 12, 1851_.

THE DEVIL'S POOL

I

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

A la sueur de ton visaige
Tu gagnerois ta pauvre vie,
Apres long travail et usaige,
Voicy la _mort_ qui te convie.[1]

The quatrain in old French written below one of Holbein's pictures is
profoundly sad in its simplicity. The engraving represents a ploughman
driving his plough through a field. A vast expanse of country stretches
away in the distance, with some poor cabins here and there; the sun is
setting behind the hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The
peasant is a short, thick-set man, old, and clothed in rags. The four
horses that he urges forward are thin and gaunt; the ploughshare is
buried in rough, unyielding soil. A single figure is joyous and alert in
that scene of _sweat and toil_. It is a fantastic personage, a skeleton
armed with a whip, who runs in the furrow beside the terrified horses
and belabors them, thus serving the old husbandman as ploughboy. This
spectre, which Holbein has introduced allegorically in the succession of
philosophical and religious subjects, at once lugubrious and burlesque,
entitled the _Dance of Death_, is Death itself.

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