e Sand is one of the few French writers who keep us closely and
truly intimate with rural nature. She gives us the wild-flowers by their
actual names,--snowdrop, primrose, columbine, iris, scabious. Nowhere
has she touched her native Berry and its little-known landscape, its
_campagnes ignorees_, with a lovelier charm than in _Valentine_. The
winding and deep lanes running out of the high road on either side, the
fresh and calm spots they take us to, "meadows of a tender green,
plaintive brooks, clumps of alder and mountain ash, a whole world of
suave and pastoral nature,"--how delicious it all is! The grave and
silent peasant whose very dog will hardly deign to bark at you, the
great white ox, "the unfailing dean of these pastures," staring solemnly
at you from the thicket; the farmhouse "with its avenue of maples, and
the Indre, here hardly more than a bright rivulet, stealing along
through rushes and yellow iris, in the field below,"--who, I say, can
forget them? And that one lane in especial, the lane where Athenais puts
her arm out of the side window of the rustic carriage and gathers May
from the overarching hedge,--that lane with its startled blackbirds, and
humming insects, and limpid water, and swaying water-plants, and
shelving gravel, and yellow wagtails hopping, half-pert,
half-frightened, on the sand,--that lane with its rushes, cresses, and
mint below, its honeysuckle and traveller's-joy above,--how gladly might
one give all that strangely English picture in English, if the charm of
Madame Sand's language did not here defy translation! Let us try
something less difficult, and yet something where we may still have her
in this her beloved world of "simplicity, and sky, and fields and trees,
and peasant life,--peasant life looked at, by preference, on its good
and sound side." _Voyez donc la simplicite, vous autres, voyez le ciel
et les champs, et les arbres, et les paysans, surtout dans ce qu'ils ont
de bon et de vrai._

The introduction to _La Mare au Diable_ will give us what we want.
George Sand has been looking at an engraving of Holbein's _Laborer._
[321] An old thick-set peasant, in rags, is driving his plough in the
midst of a field. All around spreads a wild landscape, dotted with a few
poor huts. The sun is setting behind a hill; the day of toil is nearly
over. It has been a hard one; the ground is rugged and stony, the
laborer's horses are but skin and bone, weak and exhausted. There is but
one ale