Robert's lifestyle causes him to exceed his income and fall deeply into debt. Eventually he joins the entourage of the Duc d'Orléans, cousin of King Louis XVI and an early supporter of the French Revolution.
He is a charming gambler, and, hoping to make a fortune, gets himself involved in one failed business scheme after another. Robert, the eldest son, Daphne Du Maurier's direct ancestor, unfortunately lacks his mother's business sense.
Mathurin and Magdaleine have five children, who are the main focus of the novel. It becomes a symbol of the family and how its members have endured the various transformations in France itself, from monarchy to revolution, to empire, and back to monarchy. Also, one piece, a glass goblet Mathurin makes for the king, does play an important role, and ends up being passed from generation to generation. During the scenes set in the glassworks, though, Du Maurier really makes the reader feel the heat of the furnaces. Incidentally, this is not really a novel about glass-blowing. She gets to know the workers' families and, with her excellent head for business, keeps her husband's ledgers. Magdaleine proves to be a very strong character, and wants to learn as much about the craft of glass-blowing as possible. Sophie's father, Mathurin Busson, breaks tradition when he marries Magdaleine, a lawyer's daughter. They have been glass-blowers for years before the French Revolution, when families who practiced a craft tended to marry into other families who practiced the same craft. The Busson family lives in the Sarthe region of France, southwest of Paris. The nephew has been told a version of his father's life and death, which Sophie knows is not true, and Sophie tells him the true story, which is the main part of the novel. The novel begins in 1844, when the narrator, Sophie Busson Duval, is eighty years old and meets a long-lost nephew of hers, the son of her brother Robert, who had emigrated to England during the French Revolution. The Glass-Blowers is a historical novel by Daphne Du Maurier, best known as the author of Rebecca, about a family of glass-blowers during the French Revolution.
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