A steward's daughter, brought up in a forest lodge in the Argonne, comes into money and a mill, and two men want her - one for herself, one for the timber. Theuriet spent his boyhood in the forests of Lorraine and never really left them; the woodcutting, the sawmill and the seasons here are done by a man who had watched them all his life, and the forest is not scenery.

André Theuriet (1833-1907) was a French novelist and poet. He worked in the civil service before turning to literature, and his writing often drew on the rural life of the provinces. His works include the novel A Woodland Queen; he was elected to the Académie française in 1896.