LADY ON THE WEB

Have just read George Sand's 1846 La Mare au Diable. Compared two different English translations, and chose the Frank Hunter Potter. Wanted a parallel text but could not find one, so ordered it in the original French, in a 1959 Robert Laffont/Paris edition, which was printed in Belgium. Decided to try my hand at a bit of translation, so dusted off my rusty French, in which I was so fluent at 16, before the great break, of course. After that I suffered a virtual amnesia regarding everything I was studying.

Front matter to Robert Laffont's edition of La Mare au Diable
Translated from the French by Celia Gray

A Chronology

1804
Born in Paris, July 1, of Aurore Dupin. Daughter of an officer of the imperial army, Maurice Dupin.

1804
Napoleon proclaimed emperor on May 18 at Saint-Cloud.

1808
Maurice Dupin dies of a fall from a horse. Little Aurore, who is four, is taken in by her grandmother, Mme. Dupin de Francoeuil, on her estate, Nohant, in Indre. This lady was the natural daughter of the Marshal of Saxony and the granddaughter of the King of Poland.

1808-1817
Aurore spends her entire childhood in the country in this land of Berry, dreaming of fallow fields, playing with peasant children, listening to stories in the evening. The stay is punctuated by several trips to Paris.

1814
The Restoration.

1815
The Hundred Days. Waterloo. Louis XVIII.

1817
Aurore, who is thirteen, is sent to boarding school in Paris at the Couvent des Anglaises. Despair, revolt, then mysticism.

1820
Return to Nohant: reading, dreaming.

1822
Her grandmother having died, Aurore (eighteen) marries Casimir Dudevant, son of a baron and second-lieutenant without much character. After these happy beginnings and the birth of a son (the future Maurice Sand), the life of the couple descends into ennui.

1824
Succession of Charles X.

1825-1830
Stay at Cauterets: a chaste idyll with Aurélien de Sèze stimulates the future novelist. She is already writing. Possible liaison at Nohant with Stéphane, a friend of her youth. Birth of a daughter, Solange (1828). The life of the Dudevant household is in complete collapse.

1830
July Revolution. Succession of Louis-Philippe.

1831
Aurore Dudevant, who started, at La Châtre, a joyous idyll with Jules Sandeau, quits Nohant, where she leaves her husband and – temporarily – her children, and settles in Paris. Her temperament’s powerful appetite tastes, at last, all the joys of independence and the bohemian life. To augment her income, she writes. She does articles for Le Figaro, under Latouche. Jules Sandeau helps her in her first efforts and gives himself the pseudonym of Jules Sand, under which she publishes short stories and a novel: Rose et Blanche.

1832
Publication of Indiana and Valentine under the name of George Sand. Success and money.

1833-1834
Lélia. Break with Sandeau. Affair with Musset. The lovers go to Italy. But, in Spring 1834, Musset quits Venice, leaving George with her new lover, Doctor Pagello. Lettres d’un Voyageur. Return to Paris in summer: resumption of the liaison with Musset.

1835
Definitive break with Musset in March. The newly elected Member, Michel de Bourges, introduces George Sand to politics. Likewise influenced by Pierre Leroux, Barbès, Arago, Lamennais. Aurore divorces her husband.

1838
The start of the long liaison (nine years) with Chopin. In November, the musician, George and her children go to Majorca. They come back to Paris after a troublesome winter.

1840
Le Compagnon du Tour de France glorifies manual labor and blasts the exploitation of the worker. This is the start of a series of novels on social issues: Horace (1841), where the uprisings of 1832 are evoked with such sympathy that La Revue des Deux-Mondes refuses the manuscript; Le Meunier d’Angibault (1845), a novel of rural socialism.

1846
La Mare au Diable. This is the defining moment of George Sand’s maturity. She begins the composition of her memoirs and writes François le Champi (1847). Life with Chopin, ill and sullen, deteriorates: The break takes place, without drama or battle, in July ’47.

1848
Revolutionary February insurrection. Flight of Louis-Philippe. Proclamation of the Second Republic.

1848
George Sand participates passionately in the events of the day. She is by the side of Ledru-Rollin, deliberates with Barbès and Leroux, drafts a Lettre à la Classe Moyenne, a Lettre aux Riches, a Lettre au Peuple, founds an ephemeral newspaper. She fears all bloodshed, but holds communism to be the highest ideal. After the abortive May revolution, she becomes frightened, takes refuge at Nohant, manifests inconsistencies, sinks into discouragement. She takes refuge in rustic poetry and, in September, writes La Petite Fadette.

1849
Louis-Napoléon elected president of the Republic in December ’48. The heads of the attempted May revolution go before the Haute-Cour à Bourges: Barbès and Blanqui are condemned to deportation.

1849
George Sand, under suspicion, lives withdrawn, anguished. She dares, however, to write her Lettre aux Modérés (in November), which is an appeal in favor of the condemned men. She abandons the novel, turns to the theater, her passion, and produces François le Champi (’49), Claudie and Le Mariage de Victorine (’51).

1857
Begins a liaison with her secretary, Alexandre Manceau.

1858
Renewed productivity: Les Beaux-Messieurs de Bois-Doré and L’Homme de Neige, historical novels. Then: Elle et Lui (’59), Le Marquis de Villemer (’61), etc. …

1864
At Nohant, discord between son Maurice and lover Manceau. George Sand settles at Paliseau with Manceau, who dies in ’65, their faithful affection having lasted fifteen years.

1866
Le Dernier Amour, dedicated to Flaubert. George Sand lives sometimes in Palaiseau or in Paris, sometimes at Nohant.

1870-1871
War. The Commune.

1871
George Sand reacts prudently to events. She makes orderly resolutions. Anticlerical, but spiritualist. Politically, against all fanaticism. For Le Temps, she drafts a feuilleton, Reveries et Souvenirs, publishes novels again, such as Nanon (’72). An easygoing elderly lady, she espouses a pleasant philosophy of life. At Nohant, she becomes her granddaughters’ instructor, and writes children’s stories.

1876
Her powers of invention are somewhat threadbare, but she works continuously. At the end of May, she is on the seventh chapter of her novel: Albine. She dies on the 8th of June.


Editor's Preface

La Mare au Diable, which George Sand had written at Nohant at the end of the year 1845, appeared in Le Courrier Français in February 1846. The first edition was dedicated to Chopin.

In her 1851 preface, George Sand, who feels that the critics projected onto her which she didn't have, states: "I wanted to create something very touching and very simple" and to show "the goodness and truth in peasants."

In La Mare au Diable, in fact, the author does not relinquish the socialist theories to which she was introduced by Michel de Bourges and Pierre Leroux, and which made her write Le Compagnon du Tour de France, Horace and Le Meunier d'Angibault. This new short novel exalts the purity of rural mores and the goodness of the simple workers in the fields so little known by city folk.

One can obviously speak ironically on the clear simplicity of the personalities of Germain and of little Marie, and of Father and Mother Maurice, who are transparent characters, without any "shadow side." But the "lioness," Léonard, and the farmer of Ormeaux are not viewed through rose-colored glasses at all. George Sand strives, quite consciously, not to confuse realism and wretchedness. If she idealizes her humble heroes just a bit, still they retain a realistic likeness. Too bad for the text-strainers who, as soon as they see good feelings appear, cry bad literature. Frankly, isn't it salutary, this breath of fresh air which, from one chapter to the next of La Mare au Diable, sweeps on the timid love of Germain the laborer for little Marie?

One of the main virtues of the story resides in its unity of tone, in the perfect mastery with which the author carries forward her narration. The night in the forest is particularly beautiful, but, at no moment does one sense the artist who prepares her brushes and who seeks to garner admiration by saying, "Look! Here's a page for the anthology!"

The pond which gives the novel its title is not an invention of George Sand's. One may find it in the parish of Mers-sur-Indre, in the middle of the Chanteloube woods (from chante-loup). Today, an avenue cuts the celebrated pond in two.

Opinions of George Sand

Sainte-Beuve: "La Mare au Diable is, plain and simple, a small masterpiece. The preface made me somewhat apprehensive. The author sets forth a philosophical idea, and I always tremble when I see a philosophical idea advertised in a novel … I had to say this as a matter of duty … I need now do nothing more but praise and marvel in all honesty … In two chapters entitled Sous les Grands Chênes and Prière du Soir, we have a succession of delicious and delicate scenes, which have neither counterpart nor model in any idyll, antique or modern."

Emile Faguet: "How justly proportioned are the landscape, the scenes, the dialogue and the characters, without one encroaching on the other! How one savors the descriptions without doubting that they are descriptions, so well mingled are they in the narrative and so necessary to the work!"

Jules Lemaitre: "What we owe to George Sand is a virtual revival (through sincerity) of a feeling for Nature. She knows it better, she is more familiar with it, than any of the landscape-painters who preceded her. She lives, in earnest, a life of the land, and does so effortlessly."

Heinrich Heine: "The greatest prose poet whom the French possess."

Gustave Flaubert: "One would have to have known her as I have known her, to know all that is feminine in the heart of this 'great man,' the immensity of tenderness formed in this genius."

Louis Veuillot: "Clear water running under a layer of mud."

Dostoievsky: "One of the most sublime and beautiful representatives of Woman, a woman close to unique in the vigor of her spirit and her talent."


Samples from La Mare au Diable, by George Sand
Translated from the French by Celia Gray

From the Author to the Reader

A la sueur de ton visaige
Tu gagnerois ta pauvre vie,
Après long travail et usaige,
Voicy la mort qui te convie.

By the sweat of your brow
You earn your poor living,
After long work and wear,
Death invites you to die. [Or, Now Death seems inviting.]

I

The quatrain in old French, placed beneath a composition by Holbein, is of a profound sadness in its naïveté. The engraving represents a laborer driving his plow in the middle of a field. A vast countryside extends into the distance, one sees poor huts there; the sun is setting behind the hill. […]

III

Father Maurice

"Germain," said his father-in-law to him one day, "you must make up your mind to remarry. It will soon be two years since you were widowed, and your eldest is seven years old. You're nearing thirty, my boy, and you know that, past that age, in these parts, a man is said to be too old to start a new household. You have three beautiful children, and up to this point they have not troubled us in the slightest. My wife and my daughter-in-law have done their best to take care of them, and have loved them as they should. Little Pierre is almost grown; he goads the cattle so skillfully; he is smart enough to keep the animals in the pasture, and strong enough to drive the horses to the watering-place. We're not worried about that one; but the other two, whom we love in any case, God knows, those poor innocents are giving us a lot of trouble this year. My daughter-in-law is close to her confinement, and she already has a babe-in-arms. When the one we're waiting for arrives, she will no longer be able to take care of your little Solange and above all, your Sylvain, who is only four and who hardly stays still, day or night. […]"