THE GLASS-BLOWERS
Daphne du Maurier
Foreword by Michelle de Kretser
Little, Brown and Company
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To my forebears, the master glass-blowers of la Brûlonnerie, Chérigny, la Pierre and le Chesne-Bidault.
Foreword
Daphne du Maurier was the fifth-generation descendant of a French master craftsman who settled in England during the Revolution. The Glass-Blowers, the fictionalized story of his family, was originally published in 1963, but du Maurier first conceived of writing about her French forebears in the mid-1950s. She had recently completed her novel about Mary Anne Clarke, her famous great-great-grandmother, and a complementary work about the French side of her family seemed logical. It was also providential. Since the runaway success of My Cousin Rachel at the start of the decade, no new idea had arrived to spark du Maurier into fiction. A book with family history as its impetus would fulfill her ever-present need to write, as well as providing a factual skeleton that could be fleshed out with novelistic detail. But when du Maurier visited the Loir-et-Cher region to research the lives of her glass-blowing ancestors, a chance encounter there waylaid her imagination. It led to The Scapegoat, a novel about real and assumed identities. No wonder, then, that when she finally returned to her French novel, the tension between history and story, fact and fiction, etched itself onto her narrative.
The Glass-Blowers takes the form of a letter written by Sophie Duval to her nephew, Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, in which she sets out the history of his father’s family. Sophie’s narrative is impelled by the need to distinguish reality from fantasy. Her nephew has been brought up to believe that his father, Sophie’s brother Robert, was an aristocrat who fled to England to escape guillotining during the Revolution. Not that young Louis is much interested in the turbulent events that predated his birth: “What was past was past.” For Sophie, however, who has lived through those “bitter and exciting days,” it is important that they be remembered accurately. She dutifully hands over the engraved crystal tumbler that is her nephew’s inheritance, but the more significant legacy she leaves him is the truth.
Pride plays its part in Sophie’s decision to disclose her family’s story. Louis will learn that his father was a bankrupt, once jailed for his debts, who emigrated to avoid a second prison sentence. He will learn that he comes from a family of “ordinary provincial folk” and that his father had no right to the aristocratic name of du Maurier. What I find interesting is that Sophie considers this rather sordid story morally preferable to the glamorous tale concocted by Robert. Half a century after the Revolution, she remains true to its spirit. It is better, in her view, to be a bankrupt than a royalist, better to be an artisan than an aristocrat. She wants Louis to know that his father emigrated because he feared the loss of his freedom, not the loss of his privileges. Her condemnation—and by extension du Maurier’s—of a corrupt and indolent aristocracy is absolute.
It seems to me that this story about lineage is positioning itself right at the outset in relation to two eminent ancestors. The turn of the twentieth century had seen the publication of Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (soon followed by several sequels). Du Maurier’s narrative scorns the sentimentalization of privilege that lies at the ideological heart of Sir Percy Blakeney’s adventures; it counters rose-tinted romanticism with clear-eyed realism, focusing its gaze on a modest social milieu. That focus also serves to ease The Glass-Blowers out from the formidable weight of a novel written a century earlier, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
While Dickens brings his characteristic sharpness to bear on the abuses of the Ancien Régime, his narrative, like Orczy’s, is organized around the spectacle of innocent lives menaced by the guillotine. Both novels derive their energy from their oppositional engagement with the public sphere. The Glass-Blowers, on the other hand, is essentially a private drama. The paraphernalia of domesticity is prominent: family relationships, furniture and linen and household management, pregnancy and childbirth. The narrative carves itself a space that is marked as female and interior, in contradistinction to its predecessors.
Du Maurier was conscious of avoiding the trajectory laid out for French Revolution fiction, warning her publisher not to expect “a suspense story… with heads falling.”i It would have been easy to raise the emotional pitch of The Glass-Blowers by inventing an episode along those lines. Instead, the tragedies that befall the Bussons are commonplace: babies die in infancy, a woman doesn’t survive childbirth, family loyalties give way before political differences. Emile, whose death is the most dramatic in the book, isn’t killed by the guillotine but by a reactionary’s bullet. The manner in which characters die is one way du Maurier expresses moral and literary choices in The Glass-Blowers: realism, progressive politics, and fidelity to family history are preferred over the cranked-up emotion of “a suspense story.” It is ironic—and surely not accidental—that “suspense stories,” a label used dismissively by the literary establishment, were synonymous with du Maurier’s name. So one way to read The Glass-Blowers is as a resolute attempt by du Maurier to dampen her dramatizing instincts. One of the powerful literary ancestors she is taking on here is herself.
The book’s preference for the minor key is also evident in its provincial setting. When we think of the French Revolution we think of Paris. The city is inseparable from moments that are symbolically as well as politically crucial: the Tennis Court Oath, the fall of the Bastille, the guillotining of Louis XVI, the murder of Marat; also, of course, the whiff of grapeshot that ended the dream. In Paris the Revolution modulates from history into mythology.
The originality of The Glass-Blowers is that it is not primarily concerned with that grand, mythologizing narrative. In fact, those passages that invoke it are stiffly self-conscious: Robert’s arch reference to Robespierre as a young deputy to watch exemplifies the problem. Mostly, however, the Revolution du Maurier conjures has escaped the frozen status of iconography. Chapters that describe the looting of provincial châteaux or the Vendean uprising decentralize the Revolution and render it vivid. Here is writing that captures politics as a lived experience, not yet fixed in the embalming fluid of history.
One such episode portrays the Great Fear that follows the storming of the Bastille, when stories of rampaging “brigands” sweep the countryside. The panic is specifically provincial, engendered by distance from Paris and lack of reliable communication with the capital. For provincial France, the need to distinguish between fact and rumor takes on life-or-death urgency. In other words, the Great Fear stages the novel’s key opposition between history and hearsay.
The episode also reinforces Robert’s role as an “incorrigible farceur,” an inventive fabricator of stories. The lies he tells are symptomatic of what Sophie diagnoses as folie de grandeur. They are linked to Robert’s attitude to money, to his inability to live within his means. He operates on credit, which is to say on promises—another kind of storytelling. His lies are therefore a symbolic sin against thrift just as his overspending is a literal one. The store Sophie sets on fact—“I have always preferred the truth”—might therefore be understood as a metaphor for the
bourgeois virtue of financial responsibility.
That interpretation is reinforced by the impersonal narrator of the Prologue who compares Sophie’s status as a landowner who has paid for her property with that of “any outdated seigneur” who has inherited his. It is a neat metaphor for the passage from feudalism to capitalism, of which the French Revolution is the iconic expression. It also marks the limits of the Revolution’s drift towards social equality: since property that has been paid for makes a bourgeois the equal of an aristocrat, those who possess neither land nor capital have no status.
With that limitation in mind, it is illuminating to consider the disapproval that flashes through the narrative (via Sophie) whenever excess is depicted. It is present in the scene where a revolutionary crowd inadvertently tramples a woman to death; also in the fanaticism of the Vendean rebels. Note that excess is not in itself politically charged; it occasions censure as a sign of itself, as a lack of control. Sophie’s initial support for the Revolution wanes as the enlightened reforms of its early years evolve into the excess of the Terror. Historical orthodoxy has always presented the Revolution as a movement from reason to unreason, from the thrifty management of reform to its passionate squandering. Only, of course, the development was not antithetical but organic: “Revolutionaries always demand more,” says Sophie, which I take as recognizing that passion cannot be excised from reason, excess from control.
On the political plane, then, the “excess” of which the narrative disapproves may be either the aristocratic abuse of privilege or the proletariat zeal that would abolish privilege altogether. There is a “proper” revolutionary middle course, represented in the novel by Pierre. But wariness of political outcomes alone does not strike me as an adequate explanation of the novel’s concern about excess, which is itself excessive, overdetermined.
This narrative anxiety coalesces around Robert. He has a profoundly unsettling effect on Sophie, who worries far more about his financial and narrative extravagance than about Michel or Edmé; even though they court danger more directly, even though Michel’s revolutionary fervor causes him to act in ways that Sophie finds morally dubious. But Michel and Edmé represent a purely political extreme. Robert, on the other hand, the most gifted glass-blower of the three brothers, is the novel’s portrait of an artist.
When he creates beautiful glass, Robert demonstrates masterly control of his medium. He knows that the same breath that gives shape and form to his art will destroy it if he does not exercise caution, for the first lesson glass-blowing teaches is that “Control is of supreme importance.”
Glass-blowing serves as du Maurier’s metaphor for art, in general, and specifically for fiction. And where Robert fails to exercise control is precisely in the invention of stories; his financial difficulties are the by-product of a seductive tale he has told himself about his rightful place in the world. He refuses the distinction between fact and fantasy, revealing himself as a literary spendthrift who ignores “the limits proscribed.” Here, it is useful to recall that the wild, dramatizing quality of du Maurier’s work was what critics cited when denying her literary respectability. Excess is characteristic of the gothic, of its energetic deployment of suspense and melodrama; excess is shorthand for the triumphant storytelling that had made du Maurier’s name. Consider that it was a name derived literally from a historical fiction authored by Robert, and The Glass-Blowers begins to look like a self-directed blow. In exposing the lie that constituted her name, in slanting the moral of her tale towards exactitude over extravagance, du Maurier is restaging the criticism that considered her reputation worthless, founded on gaudy excess.
But here’s the thing: Robert is easily the most compelling character in the novel. When it isn’t focused on his imaginative fictions The Glass-Blowers loses its verve, settling into a dutiful chronicle of family and revolutionary history. Du Maurier might have wanted her work to be taken seriously but I think the storyteller in her rejected the terms of assessment. And so Robert reaches through time to steal Sophie’s story. Beside his flash lies, her account-keeping looks a little niggardly.
Finally, a personal coda. I first read du Maurier when I was twelve or thirteen, drawn by those lurid Pan jackets on my older sister’s bookshelves. The novels that held me enthralled were the famous ones: Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, Jamaica Inn. Of The Glass-Blowers I retained only the haziest picture; I suspect I didn’t finish it. When it came to fiction about the French Revolution, I was for the high-octane drama of Sidney Carton and Sir Percy. Until I was invited to write this introduction, I had forgotten du Maurier’s reworking of the subject.
And yet, and yet. Years later and in another country, I wrote a novel set in provincial France during the Revolution, with a heroine called Sophie. My book had its immediate origins in quite other sources. But surely some tendril of memory, however frail, linked it to a day I can no longer remember when a girl lay on her bed reading The Glass-Blowers.
So in the end what I find moving about this novel is its understanding of the tenacity of the past, how it keeps us company even when we neglect it. When Robert asks Sophie where our younger selves go, how they dissolve and vanish, she answers that they don’t. “They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life.”
Michelle de Kretser,
2004
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following for their great help in making known to me the many facts relating to my forebears, the Bussons, during the hundred years from 1747–1845, as well as the historical events in the départements of Sarthe and Loir-et-Cher during the revolutionary period:
Mademoiselle Madeleine Fargeaud of Paris
Mr. Robert Glass of Paris
Mrs. St. George Saunders of London
Professeur R. Bouis of Blois, author of Les Elections à la Convention Nationale dans le Département de Loir-et-Cher, etc.
Monsieur André Bouton of Le Mans, author of Les Francs-Maçons Manceaux et la Révolution Française
Monsieur Paul Cordonnier of Le Mans, author of L’Invasion et la Déroute de l’Armée Vendéenne au Mans, etc.
Madame Marthe of la Pierre, Coudrecieux
Prologue
One day in the June of 1844 Madame Sophie Duval, née Busson, eighty years of age and mother of the mayor of Vibraye, a small commune in the département of Sarthe, rose from her chair in the salon of her property at le Gué de Launay, chose her favorite walking stick from a stand in the hall, and calling to her dog made her way, as was her custom at this hour of the afternoon every Tuesday, down the short approach drive to the entrance gate.
She walked briskly, with the quick step of one who did not suffer, or perhaps refused to suffer, any of the inconveniences of old age; and her bright blue eyes—the noticeable feature of her otherwise unremarkable face—looked keenly to right and left, pinpointing signs of negligence on the part of the gardener: the gravel under her feet not raked this morning as it should have been, the careless staking of a lily, the grass verges of the formal flower bed raggedly clipped.
These matters would be corrected at their proper time, either by her son the mayor or by herself; for although Pierre-François had been mayor of Vibraye for some fourteen years, and was approaching his forty-seventh birthday, he knew very well that the house and grounds at le Gué de Launay were his mother’s property, that in all matters referring to their upkeep and maintenance she must be the final judge and arbitrator. This small estate which Madame Duval and her husband had settled upon for their retirement at the turn of the century was no great domain, a few acres of ground only, and the house was of medium size; but it was their own, bought and paid for by themselves, so giving them both the status of landowners and making them the proud equal of any outdated seigneur who still boasted that he held a property by right of birth.
Madame Duval adjusted the widow’s cap upon her crown of white hair, set in pin curls high on her forehead. As she arrived at the end of the approach drive she heard the sound she wa
s expecting, the click of the fastened iron gate and the rasp of the hinge as it swung open, while the gardener—later to be reprimanded—who also served as odd-man, groom and messenger, came towards her with the mail he had fetched from Vibraye.
Her son the mayor usually brought the letters back with him of an evening, if there were any to bring, but once a week, every Tuesday, there came the very special letter written to Madame Duval from her married daughter in Paris, Madame Rosiau; and since this was the most precious moment of her week the old lady could not bear to wait for it. She had given special orders to the gardener for many months now, ever since the Rosiaus had left Mamers for Paris, to go himself on foot the few kilometers to Vibraye, and enquire for the letters addressed to le Gué de Launay, and give them into her hands.
This he now did, doffing his hat, and placing uppermost in her hands the expected letter, with his customary remark, “Now madame is content.” “Thank you, Joseph,” she replied. “Find your way to the kitchen and see if there is some coffee for you”—as though the gardener, who had worked for her at le Gué de Launay for thirty years, was looking for the kitchen for the first time. She waited until he was out of sight before she followed him, for it was part of the ritual to be preceded by the servant and walk herself, with measured step, at a certain distance in the rear, the unopened envelope clutched tightly to her, the dog at her heels; and then up the steps and into the house, and to the salon, where she would seat herself once more in her chair by the window, and give herself up to the long-awaited pleasure of the weekly letter.
The tie between mother and daughter was close, as it had been once, so many years ago, between Sophie Duval and her own mother Magdaleine. Sons, even if they lived under one’s roof, had their own preoccupations, their business, their wives, political interests; but a daughter, even if she took to herself a husband as Zoë had done, and a very able doctor at that, remained always part of the mother, a nestling, intimate and confiding, a sharer of ills and joys, using the same family expressions long forgotten by the sons. The pains of the daughter were the pains the mother herself knew, or had known: the trifling differences between husband and wife that occurred from time to time had all been endured by Madame Duval in days gone by, along with housekeeping troubles, high prices in the market, sudden illnesses, the dismissal of a servant, the numerous trifles that went with a woman’s day.