The Devils Pool | Page 6

much grace combined with so much strength, I had a
feeling of profound compassion mingled with involuntary respect.
Happy the husbandman. Yes, so I should be in his place, if my arm
should suddenly become strong and my chest powerful, so that they
could thus fertilize nature and sing to her, without my eyes losing the
power to see and my brain to understand the harmony of colors and
sounds, the delicacy of tones, and the gracefulness of contours,--in a
word, the mysterious beauty of things, and, above all, without my heart
ceasing to be in relation with the divine sentiment that presided at the
immortal and sublime creation.
But, alas! that man has never understood the mystery of the beautiful,
that child will never understand it! God preserve me from the thought
that they are not superior to the animals they guide, and that they have
not at times a sort of ecstatic revelation that charms away their
weariness and puts their cares to sleep! I see upon their noble brows the
seal of the Lord God, for they are born kings of the earth much more
truly than they who possess it, because they have paid for it. And the
proof that they feel that it is so is found in the fact that you cannot

expatriate them with impunity, and that they love the ground watered
by the sweat of their brow, that the true peasant dies of homesickness in
the uniform of the soldier, far from the fields where he was born. But
that man lacks a part of the enjoyments I possess, immaterial
enjoyments to which he is abundantly entitled, he the workman in the
vast temple which the heavens are vast enough to embrace. He lacks
knowledge of his own sentiments. They who condemned him to
servitude from his mother's womb, being unable to take from him the
power of reverie, have taken the power of reflection.
Ah! well, such as he is, incomplete and doomed to never-ending
childhood, he is nobler even so than he in whom knowledge has stifled
sentiment. Do not place yourselves above him, you who consider
yourselves endowed with the lawful and inalienable right to command
him, for that terrible error proves that in you the mind has killed the
heart and that you are the most incomplete and the blindest of men!--I
prefer the simplicity of his mind to the false enlightenment of yours;
and if I had to tell his life, it would be more pleasant for me to bring out
its attractive and affecting aspects than it is creditable to you to depict
the abject condition to which the scornful rigor of your social precepts
may debase him.
I knew that young man and that beautiful child; I knew their story, for
they had a story, everybody has his story, and everybody might arouse
interest in the romance of his own life if he but understood it. Although
a peasant and a simple ploughman, Germain had taken account of his
duties and his affections. He had detailed them to me ingenuously one
day, and I had listened to him with interest. When I had watched him at
work for a considerable time, I asked myself why his story should not
be written, although it was as simple, as straightforward, and as devoid
of ornament as the furrow he made with his plough.
Next year that furrow will be filled up and covered by a new furrow.
Thus the majority of men make their mark and disappear in the field of
humanity. A little earth effaces it, and the furrows we have made
succeed one another like graves in the cemetery. Is not the furrow of
the ploughman as valuable as that of the idler, who has a name,

however, a name that will live, if, by reason of some peculiarity or
some absurd exploit, he makes a little noise in the world?
So let us, if we can, rescue from oblivion the furrow of Germain, the
cunning ploughman. He will know nothing about it, and will not be
disturbed; but I shall have had a little pleasure in making the attempt.

III
PÈRE MAURICE
"Germain," his father-in-law said to him one day, "you must make up
your mind to marry again. It's almost two years since you lost my
daughter, and your oldest boy is seven years old. You're getting on
toward thirty, my boy, and when a man passes that age, you know, in
our province, he's considered too old to begin housekeeping again. You
have three fine children, and thus far they haven't been a trouble to us.
My wife and daughter-in-law have looked after them as well as they
could, and loved them as they ought. There's Petit-Pierre, he's what you
might call educated;