The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Devil's Pool, by George Sand

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Title: The Devil's Pool

Author: George Sand

Illustrator: E. Abot

Translator: Jane Minot Sedgwick And Ellery Sedgwick

Release Date: July 4, 2007 [EBook #21993]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVIL'S POOL ***

Produced by David Widger

THE DEVIL'S POOL

By George Sand

Translated From The French By Jane Minot Sedgwick And Ellery Sedgwick

With An Etching By E. Abot

1901

THE DEVIL'S POOL

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

_A la sueur de ton visaige,
Tu gagnerais ta pauvre vie.
Apres long travail et usaige,
Voicy la mort qui te convie._ *

THIS quaint old French verse, written under one of Holbein's pictures,
is profoundly melancholy. The engraving represents a laborer driving his
plow through the middle of a field. Beyond him stretches a vast horizon,
dotted with wretched huts; the sun is sinking behind the hill. It is the
end of a hard day's work. The peasant is old, bent, and clothed in rags.
He is urging onward a team of four thin and exhausted horses; the
plowshare sinks into a stony and ungrateful soil. One being only is
active and alert in this scene of toil and sorrow. It is a fantastic
creature. A skeleton armed with a whip, who acts as plowboy to the old
laborer, and running along through the furrow beside the terrified
horses, goads them on. This is the specter Death, whom Holbein has
introduced allegorically into that series of religious and philosophic
subjects, at once melancholy and grotesque, entitled "The Dance of
Death."

* In toil and sorrow thou shalt eat
The bitter bread of poverty.
After the burden and the heat,
Lo! it is Death who calls for thee.

In this collection, or rather this mighty composition, where Death, who
plays his part on every page, is the connecting link and predominating
thought, Holbein has called up kings, popes, lovers, gamesters,
drunkards, nuns, courtesans, thieves, warriors, monks, Jews, and
travelers,--all the people of his time and our own; and everywhere the
specter Death is among them, taunting, thr