tuous months were
over, and Madame Sand, thrown out of the hurly-burly of active politics,
was brought back by the course of events to Nohant, she seems to have
taken up her pen very much where she had laid it down. The break in her
ordinary round of work made by the excitements of active statesmanship
was hardly perceptible, and in 1849 _Le Champi_ was followed by _La
Petite Fadette_.

_La Mare au Diable_, George Sand's first tale of exclusively
peasant-life, is usually considered her masterpiece in this _genre_. It
was suggested to her, she tells us, by Holbein's dismal engraving of
death coming to the husbandman, an old, gaunt, ragged, over-worked
representative of his tribe--grim ending to a life of cheerless poverty
and toil!

Here was the dark and painful side of the laborer's existence--a true
picture, but not the whole truth. There was another and a bright side,
which might just as allowably be represented in art as the dreary one,
and which she had seen and studied. In Berry extreme poverty was the
exception, and the agriculturist's life appeared as it ought to be,
healthy, calm, and simple, its laboriousness compensated by the soothing
influences of nature, and of strong home affections.

This little gem of a work is thoroughly well-known. The ploughing-scene
in the opening--ploughing as she had witnessed it sometimes in her own
neighborhood, fresh, rough ground broken up for tillage, the plough
drawn by four yoke of young white oxen new to their work and but
half-tamed, has a simplicity and grandeur of effect not easy to parallel
in modern art. The _motif_ of the tale is that you often go far to
search for the good fortune that lies close to your door. Never was so
homely an adage more freshly and prettily illustrated; yet how slight
are the materials, how plain is the outline! Germain, the well-to-do,
widowed laborer, in the course of a few miles' ride, a journey
undertaken in order to present himself and his addresses to the rich
widow his father desires him to woo, discovers the real life-companion
he wants in the poor girl-neighbor, whom he patronizingly escorts on her
way to the farm where she is hired for service. It all slowly dawns upon
him, in the most natural manner, as the least incidents of the journey
call out her good qualities of head and heart--her helpfulness in
misadventure, forgetfulness of self, unaffected fondness for children,
instinctively recognized by Germain's little boy, who, wit