The Devil's Pool

Germain, a widower in his late twenties, still lives with his late wife's family. His father-in-law Maurice decides that two years of mourning is long enough-Germain needs a wife, and his children need a mother. Having found what he believes is a suitable match in a neighboring village, Maurice sends Germain off to meet her, and along the way Germain agrees to drop off a teenage girl, Marie, at the farm where she has been newly employed. What follows demonstrates the old truth that the best-laid plans often go awry. The Devil's Pool is the first of four pastoral novels George Sand originally intended to publish together, inspired by the rural community of her own upbringing. Written with warmth and simplicity, it is considered one of the finest expressions of French pastoral fiction, prizing the quiet dignity of country life and the unpredictable workings of the heart. Readers who enjoy gentle, character-driven love stories steeped in rural French tradition-and anyone charmed by Mauprat or George Sand's other work-will find this short, tender novel a delight. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)