statesmanship was hardly perceptible, and in 1849 Le Champi was followed by La Petite Fadette.
La Mare au Diable, George Sand's first tale of exclusively peasant-life, is usually considered her masterpiece in this genre. It was suggested to her, she tells us, by Holbein's dismal engraving of death coming to the husbandman, an old, gaunt, ragged, overworked representative of his tribe—grim ending to life of cheerless poverty and toil!
Here was the dark and painful side of the labourer's existence—a true picture, but not the whole truth. There was another and a bright side, which might just as allowably be represented in art as the dreary one, and which she had seen and studied. In Berry extreme poverty was the exception, and the agriculturist's life appeared as it ought to be, healthy, calm, and simple, its laboriousness compensated by the soothing influences of nature, and of strong home affections.
This little gem of a work is thoroughly well known. The ploughing-scene in the opening—ploughing as she had witnessed it sometimes in her own neighbourhood, fresh, rough ground broken up for tillage, the plough drawn by four yoke of young white oxen new to their work and but half-tamed, has a simplicity and grandeur of effect not easy to parallel in modern art. The motif of the tale is that you often go far to search for the good fortune that lies close to your door. Never was so homely an adage more freshly and prettily illus-
