![]() ![]() The storming of the Bastille and other important events is told via gossip and second hand scaremongering as panic spreads across the land, and thieves and brigands are seen in every shadow, ready to burn crops and steal wood. It’s not long before the issues building up in Paris spills out into the countryside. Sophie herself gets married in 1788 in a joint wedding with her younger sister. The story starts with Sophie’s mother getting married in the 1770s in rural France, where the glass blowers are situated beside the forests that provide the fuel for the furnaces. Using her own family history as inspiration, Du Maurier gives us the ageing Sophie Duval, who has promised her nephew that she will tell the story of their family, starting with her mother marrying into the local community of glass blowers. But crashing into this world comes the violence and terror of the French Revolution against which, the family struggles to survive. ‘If you marry into glass’ Pierre Labbe warns his daughter, ‘you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world’. The world of the glass-blowers has its own traditions, its own language – and its own rules. Faithful to her word, Sophie Duval reveals to her long-lost nephew the tragic story of a family of master craftsmen in eighteenth-century France. ![]()
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