The Devil's Pool and Other Stories

Introduction

c Introduction The Devil’s Pool (La Mare au diable) has always been George Sand’s most popular work. Scholars and specialists may have their own preferences; but with the general public, this book has always been the favorite. It is her Gigi, her Ethan Frome, her Pride and Prejudice. It is one of the few Sand works that continued to be read during the long drought when most of her books were neglected, and at the present day it retains its supremacy. At the time of writing, 117 editions of works by George Sand are available in France. No fewer than fifteen of them are editions of La Mare au diable, and one of those is the overall Sand bestseller. This popularity is not hard to explain. No other work by George Sand contains so many of its author’s characteristic merits packed into such a short space. The Devil’s Pool occupies a central position in her output, both chronologically and thematically. It belongs to the middle years of her long career; it is early enough to have ties with her first novels, it is advanced enough to contain anticipations of those still to come, yet it is also firmly grounded in the concerns and interests of its own era. Here is George Sand the critic of conventional marriage and other established institutions . Here is George Sand the regional writer, the sharp-eyed observer of distinctive local customs. Here is the political George Sand, the opponent of injustice, the advocate of the underprivileged . Here is the George Sand of fantasy, fairy tale, and nightmare . Here, above all, is the George Sand who knows how to tell a story. Moreover, The Devil’s Pool contains these attractions in an unusually concise form. Like so many popular favorites (Gigi and Ethan Frome among them)—and unlike so many of Sand’s books— it has the advantage of brevity. When it was written, its author was forty-one years old. She was born on 1 July 1804 and was named Amandine-Aurore-Lucie 1 2 Introduction (or Amantine-Aurore-Lucile) Dupin. Her family background was distinctly unconventional, and contains complexities of relationship that are difficult to express clearly; standard English was never designed to deal with such situations. Her grandmother, for instance , was the product of an illegitimate union between the illegitimate son of King Augustus II of Poland and the illegitimate daughter of a common prostitute. The novelist herself was barely legitimate; her parents married three weeks before she was born. Her father was a second cousin of the last three Bourbon kings of France (Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X); her mother’s father ran a tavern. In September 1808 her father died; but the remainder of her early life seemed to proceed along stable lines. Her paternal grandmother raised her on the family estate at Nohant until 1818, when, in the time-honored manner, the girl was sent to a Parisian convent to complete her education. (The convent was the Couvent des Anglaises, and most of the staff were British; in that unlikely environment were sown some of the seeds that would come to fruition over a decade later in “Lavinia.”) In 1820 she returned to Nohant and, again in the time-honored manner, began to receive visits from possible husbands and their families. In September 1822, after five months’ acquaintance, she married Casimir Dudevant. Dudevant was twenty-seven years old. He may have seemed superficially suitable, but he shared very few of his wife’s interests. Moreover, like many young men in that environment, he had developed habits of heavy drinking and sexual promiscuity, which proved hard to break after marriage. Disharmony and drink sometimes led him to be physically violent, and that was not calculated to improve the situation. His wife dealt with the increasing conflict and isolation in the home environment partly by turning to other men for a salvation they could never really provide (as “The Unknown God,” among other works, will observe), but partly by doing something more practical—withdrawing into the realm of her own imagination. Probably in the early months of 1829, she began to write stories. When, at the end of 1830, she finally broke with her husband and went to live in Paris, she was already starting to think of a career as a professional writer. During 1831 she published, sometimes anonymously, sometimes under various pseudonyms, a number of short pieces and a full-length...