'What I do,' said Magdaleine Labbé, my mother, 'I do with my eyes open, without any vain ideas of an easy life, or believing I can sit back and be waited upon. Theirs was indeed a closed community, with every man, woman, and child knowing his place within the walls, from the director himself, who worked beside his men, sharing their labor, wearing the same apparel, yet looked upon by all as lord and master, to the little child of six or seven who fetched and carried, taking his shift with his elders, seizing his chance to approach the foundry fire. The laws, customs, and privileges of the glass-makers were more strictly observed than the feudal rights of the aristocracy they had more justice too, and they made more sense. It had its own rules and customs, and a separate language too, handed down not only from father to son but from master to apprentice, instituted heaven knows how many centuries ago wherever the glass-makers settled-in Normandy, in Lorraine, by the Loire-but always, naturally, by forests, for wood was the glass foundry's food, the mainstay of its existence. The glass world was unique, a law unto itself. As his bride you will find it hard to adapt yourself to their way of life.' 'He is steady, hardworking, and a very fine craftsman but it is breaking with tradition for a glass-maker to marry outside his own community. Christophe and law officer to the district, and a man of some importance. 'I have no doubt Mathurin Busson will succeed in everything he undertakes,' continued Pierre Labbé, who was himself bailiff at St. Both brothers showed great promise, and my father Mathurin had risen rapidly to the rank of master glass-maker, working directly under Robert Brossard the proprietor, who was a member of one of the four great glassmaking families in France. They had never had eyes for anyone but each other from the day they met, and my father, the son of a merchant in glass, orphaned at an early age, had been apprenticed with his brother Michel to the glass-house known as la Brûlonnerie, in the Vendôme, between Busloup and la Ville-aux-Clercs.

She was twenty-two years old, and her prospective bridegroom, Mathurin Busson, master glass-maker from the neighboring village of Chenu, was a childhood sweetheart, four years older than herself. 'If you marry into glass,' Pierre Labbé warned my mother, his daughter Magdaleine, in 1747, 'you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world.'

The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier