JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
"A la sueur de ton visaige
Tu gagneras ta pauvre vie;
Après long travail et usaige
Voicy la mort qui te convie."[1]
Millet's work has been justly considered as a poem of country life wherein all the occupations of the year are described. It has been likened to the poems of Hesiod, where the mystic abstraction of the thinker is found side by side with the familiar precepts of the Almanach du bon laboureur. In particular his work recalls, to some minds, those mediaeval calenders in which cathedral sculptors and Franco-Flemish illuminators, presented with untiring interest the larger scenes of country life.
But Millet's calender is one that has no
- ↑
"Thy life thou shalt gain
In the sweat of thy brow;
After long toil and pain
Death beckons thee now."This old verse is to be found beneath an engraving by Holbein described by George Sand in her Mare au Diable, the reading of which greatly impressed Millet and partly inspired his Death and the Woodcutter.
197
