Table of Contents
| Chapter | |
| [I] | The Tillage of the Soil |
| [II] | Father Maurice |
| [III] | Germain, the Skilled Husbandman |
| [IV] | Mother Guillette |
| [V] | Petit-Pierre |
| [VI] | On the Heath |
| [VII] | Underneath the Big Oaks |
| [VIII] | The Evening Prayer |
| [IX] | Despite the Cold |
| [X] | Beneath the Stars |
| [XI] | The Belle of the Village |
| [XII] | The Master |
| [XIII] | The Old Woman |
| [XIV] | The Return to the Farm |
| [XV] | Mother Maurice |
| [XVI] | Little Marie |
| Appendix | |
| [I] | A Country Wedding |
| [II] | The Wedding Favors |
| [III] | The Wedding |
| [IV] | The Cabbage |
THE DEVIL’S POOL
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
A la sueur de ton visaige,
Tu gagnerais ta pauvre vie.
Après long travail et usaige,
Voicy la mort qui te convie.[1]
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.”