The Miller of Angibault: A New Translation
Marcelle de Blanchemont has just become a widow. Her husband - a dissolute baron who spent his life keeping mistresses and accumulating debts - has managed to die in a duel over another woman, leaving his wife nothing. For Marcelle, who never loved him, this is not a tragedy. It is an opportunity.
The man she does love is Henri L mor: working-class, principled, socialist by conviction, and constitutionally unwilling to marry a wealthy woman. As a matter of democratic conscience, he refuses to live off inherited money. When Marcelle's widowhood should finally free them to be together, Henri flees to the Berry countryside and hides at the mill of Angibault.
Marcelle follows - for her own reasons, not his. The Blanchemont estate needs to be settled, its debts faced, its future decided. She arrives in the Black Valley, the foggy, stream-cut Berry countryside that Sand knew as her own landscape, and meets Grand-Louis: the miller himself, honest and generous, in love with Rose Bricolin, the daughter of the wealthiest peasant in the region. Rose loves him back. Her father, Bricolin - a man who has spent a lifetime reducing everything to its monetary value, and who has already driven one daughter mad with grief by blocking her love for the same reason - will not permit the match. The miller is too poor.
Two couples, two barriers, the same obstacle: money and its power to decide who may love whom.
Serialized in 1845 in La R forme - the republican daily that would help make the Revolution of 1848 - after being refused by a more conservative publisher as too politically explicit, Le Meunier d'Angibault is George Sand's most fully realized rural socialist novel, drawing on the philosophy of Pierre Leroux and on the actual Berry landscape around Nohant that Sand was learning to love all over again. Its mill stands on the Vauvre at Montipouret to this day.
The novel was dedicated to Sand's daughter Solange. Written in the year before La Mare au Diable, it marks the moment when her socialist convictions and her pastoral imagination found each other, and decided to stay.
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