London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ltd.
A FRENCH COUNTRY BOOK
THE FIELDS OF FRANCE
BY
MADAME MARY DUCLAUX
(A. MARY F. ROBINSON)
Third Edition. Crown 8vo, 5s. net.
PRESS COMMENTS.
The Times.—“Madame Duclaux is in love with her subject, and brings to it a mind full of sympathy, an imagination quickened by knowledge and tender association, and a sense of beauty at once catholic, penetrating, and minutely observant. She is also economic in a large and liberal sense, deeply versed in the history of rural France, and well-skilled in applying its teachings to the study of modern conditions. But Sociology is a very arid title to give to essays so instinct with life, movement, and poetry. Madame Duclaux has much more affinity with Wordsworth in his better moods than with a Social Science Congress.... It is its variety, its unobtrusive scholarship, its wide range of knowledge, the easy grace and blithe modulation of its phrasing, the gentle kindly temper, shrewd insight, and lively sensibility of the writer that contrive to make it a book to be read with delight and studied with profit.”
Daily News.—“Everywhere she gives the sense of that wonderful world of out-of-doors, which seems fading from the horizon of the modern town-dweller. There is a reaching back to primitive things; night and silence; the thrill and magic of growing life; all the spirit of spring and harvest—and in this delightful land she shows the French peasant.... In this rural life there is the secret of a civilization which has vanished from England.”