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how lacking in intuition men could be in persuading themselves that mending some stranger's socks, and attending to his comfort, could content a woman...
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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The system might one day change, but human nature remained the same, and there were always people who profited at the expense of others.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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The glass-blower's cat is bompstable,” said Mr. Parker aloud and distinctly.
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Dorothy L. Sayers
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Yes, I hate blown glass art and I happen to live in the blown glass art capital of the world, Seattle, Washington. Being a part of the Seattle artistic community, I often get invited to galleries that are displaying the latest glass sculptures by some amazing new/old/mid-career glass blower. I never go. Abstract art leaves me feeling stupid and bored. Perhaps it’s because I grew up inside a tribal culture, on a reservation where every song and dance had specific ownership, specific meaning, and specific historical context. Moreover, every work of art had use—art as tool: art to heal; art to honor, art to grieve. I think of the Spanish word carnal, defined as, ‘Of the appetites and passions of the body.’ And I think of Gertrude Stein’s line, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.’ When asked what that line meant, Stein said, ‘The poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there.’ So when I say drum, the drum is really being pounded in this poem; when I say fancydancer, the fancydancer is really spinning inside this poem; when I say Indian singer, that singer is really wailing inside this poem. But when it comes to abstract art—when it comes to studying an organically shaped giant piece of multi-colored glass—I end up thinking, ‘That looks like my kidney. Anybody’s kidney, really. And frankly, there can be no kidney-shaped art more beautiful—more useful and closer to our Creator—than the kidney itself. And beyond that, this glass isn’t funny. There’s no wit here. An organic shape is not inherently artistic. It doesn’t change my mind about the world. It only exists to be admired. And, frankly, if I wanted to only be in admiration of an organic form, I’m going to watch beach volleyball. I’m always going to prefer the curve of a woman’s hip or a man’s shoulder to a piece of glass that has some curves.
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Sherman Alexie (Face)
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Sentiment can turn afterlife into a fairy tale for children, and I prefer this to Edmé’s theory of oblivion.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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In fact, one of the first decrees passed, the day after the storming of the Tuileries, was an order giving every municipality throughout the country the right to arrest suspects on sight.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Here was Pierre laying down the law about what the King should say to the Assembly, or what the Assembly should say to the King, and yet he could not order his own unruly boys to come down from off the hay-shocks. My mother would have done so and boxed the ears of the pair of them.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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The carriages and the folk who rode in them, gorgeously if sometimes absurdly attired, had made a kind of magic, and given a fairy-tale glitter to the capital. Now it seemed just like any other city,
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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These instruments are now made in bulk and used by doctors and chemists all over France, while my father’s name is forgotten, but a hundred years ago the “instruments de chimie” designed at la Brûlonnerie were sought after by all the apothecaries in Paris.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Marat, in L’Ami du Peuple, declared that the only way to save the Revolution for the people was to slaughter the aristocrats en masse; yet if this happened the innocent might suffer with the guilty. Somehow, we no longer seemed to preach the brotherhood of man.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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They say death does this to us once we are warned. Unconsciously, we strive not to waste time. Pettiness falls away, with all those things of little value in our lives. Could we but have known sooner, we tell ourselves, it would have been otherwise; no anger, no destruction, above everything no pride.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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But he was quite eclipsed by one of the deputies of the Third Estate, a young lawyer called Robespierre—I wonder if Pierre has heard of him?—who suggested that the Archbishop would do better if he told his fellow clergy to join forces with the patriots who were friends to the people, and that if they wanted to help they might set an example by giving up some of their own luxurious way of living, and returning to the simple ways of the founder of their faith.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?” “They don’t,” I said. “They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life. I’ve been aware of mine, often enough, wearing a pinafore over my starched frock, chasing Edmé up and down the great staircase in la Pierre.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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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;
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Ah! Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira! Les aristocrates à la lanterne, Ah! Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira! Les aristocrates on les pendra!
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Influence is all,” whispered Robert in my ear, “even when a city is swept by revolution.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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I wondered, thinking how much my husband must have borne in silence in order to spare his friend. Men have strange loyalties to one another.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Nothing is degraded that is bequeathed with love. My father handed down a passion for craftsmanship to the grandsons he never saw.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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it occurred to me that both rumors and revolutions might be among those things which rebound very frequently upon the heads of those who start them.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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The truth?” repeated Robert. “Nobody ever knows the truth in this world.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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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.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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In Paris,” my mother finished for him, “a man can be ruined in less than a month, with or without friends.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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So… she had held to her vow of taking a husband of middle age who, if not as rich as Croesus, was not far off it.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Pierre a notary! Had he said a lion-tamer I should have been less astonished.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Why is it,” she asked, “that two of your brothers should deliberately go against every principle I hold dear, and so destroy themselves in the process?
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Custom, it is said, makes all things acceptable.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Death, instead of severing all ties, made family feeling stronger.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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My aunt, who disapproved of gaiety on principle, made a moue of disdain.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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A master glass-maker must accustom himself to moving on. In old days they had always been wanderers, going from one forest to another, settling for a few years only.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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She is like a child playing at houses,” whispered my mother. “What I ask myself is this—where will it all end?
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?’ ‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?” “They don’t,” I said. “They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Bread was their main fare—they could not afford meat—and a man earning at the rate of one livre or twenty sous a day, with a hungry family to feed, paid half his wages on bread alone.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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There,” she said to the boy George, “remain true to your talent, and the glass will bring you luck. Abuse your talent, or neglect it, as my brother did, and the luck will run out of the glass.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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There comes this supreme moment to the glass-blower, when he can either breathe life and form into the growing bubble slowly taking shape before his eyes, or shatter it into a thousand fragments.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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St. Christophe might become Rabriant, Madame Busson a “citoyenne,” kings, queens, and princes go to their death and the whole country change; but my mother had held fast to her own timeless world.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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The glass world was unique, a law unto itself. 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.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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If my mother had known what small seed of longing she was sowing in my brother’s being, to develop into a folie de grandeur that nearly broke my father’s heart, and certainly was partly responsible for his death, she would not have taken Robert so often to the château at Chérigny, to be fed and fondled by the marquise. She would have put him to play among the hens and pigs in the muddied farmyard of le Maurier.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Perhaps losing my first child had made me hard. Nothing Robert could say or do would ever again surprise me. If he chose to leave us this way, although my heart yearned after him it was his choice, not ours.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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All attempts on the part of her son to dissuade her were useless. She remained firm. “If this man is an impostor I shall know it directly I set eyes on him,” she said. “If not, then I shall have done my duty.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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I felt, child as I was, that she was more than my mother; she was some sort of deity, more powerful than the gentle statue of the Blessed Virgin standing in the church at Coudrecieux, the equal of God himself.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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She does not know what is good for her, any more than all the so-called patriots in the country. Someone should have the nerve, and the power, to say ‘Enough.’ But they’re like a lot of sheep without a shepherd.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the middle of the river last night with no clothes on.
H'rm, said Atticus. He touched his glasses. I hope you weren't doing the backstroke.
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Harper Lee
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When the last toast had been given my mother had to take off her finery and put on a traveling dress, then mount one of the foundry wagons with the rest of them, and so drive away to her new home in the forest of Fréteval.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Perhaps we shall not see each other again. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best as I can, the story of your family. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that same breath, shatter and destroy it. If what I write displeases you, it will not matter. Throw my letters in the fire unread, and keep your illusions. For myself, I have always preferred to know the truth.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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I don’t know why it had to be that one,” she said, her voice unsteady still. “He wasn’t doing anything. If it could have been the man who cracked his whip…” “It never is,” I said. “It’s never the right man. That’s why it’s so useless.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Life, on the contrary, is at its most intense when it is silent; the silence of a prison cell, for instance, which gives every opportunity for thought, or when sitting beside the dead body of a loved one to whom you never bade goodbye.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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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.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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The months of anxiety had taken their toll of my mother, with the journeys backwards and forwards to Paris which had continued during the summer. She had never cared for the capital; and now, she told us, she had no desire to set foot in it again.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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A wave of perfume came from these fine folk, a strange exotic scent like flowers no longer fresh, whose petals curl, and this stale richness somehow mingled with the drab dirt of those beside us, pressing forward even as we did, in a dumb desire to see the Queen.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Men call us the weaker sex. Perhaps it’s true. Yet to carry life within us as we do, to feel it bud and flower and come from us fully formed as a living creature, separate though part of ourselves, and watch it fade and die—this asks for strength and spiritual endurance.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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She said, You cannot hide forever, though you may try. I’ve seen you in the kitchen, in the garden. I’ve seen the things you have sewn — curtains of dawn, twilight blankets and dresses for the sisters like a garden of stars. I have heard the stories you tell. You are the one who transforms, who creates. You can go out into the world and show others. They will feel less alone because of you, they will feel understood, unburdened by you, awakened by you, freed of guilt and shame and sorrow. But to share with them you must wear shoes you must go out you must not hide you must dance and it will be harder you must face jealousy and sometimes rage and desire and love which can hurt most of all because of what can then be taken away. So make that astral dress to fit your own body this time. And here are glass shoes made from your words, the stories you have told like a blower -with her torch forming the thinnest, most translucent sheets of light out of what was once sand. But be careful; sand is already broken but glass breaks. The shoes are for dancing, not for running away.
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Francesca Lia Block
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It has always seemed to me significant that Robert’s first memories, whenever he spoke of them, should not be of the farmhouse le Maurier, or of the lowing of cattle, the scratching of hens and other homely sounds, or even of the roar of the furnace chimney and the bustle of the glass-house; but always of an immense salon, so he described it, filled with mirrors and satin-covered chairs, with a harpsichord standing in one corner, and a fine lady, not my mother, picking him up in her arms and kissing him, then feeding him with little sugared cakes.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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We had been careful, ever since the September decrees, to adopt the new courtesies. Monsieur and madame were things of the past, like the old calendar. I had to remind myself also that today was the 19th Frimaire, Year II of the Republic, and no longer the 9th of December, 1793.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Jacques Duval became a close friend of Marat, editor of L’Ami du Peuple, one of the most widely read and popular newspapers in Paris, and he used to send this down to us every week, so that we could keep abreast of all that was said and done in the capital. I was not sure what to make of it myself; it was an inflammatory sheet, whipping its readers to violence, and urging them to take action against the “enemies of the people” if legislation should be slow. Michel and François read every word of it, and passed it on to the workmen too—a mistaken gesture.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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For myself, I could think of nothing more likely to cause panic and consternation among a crowd of women than to be shut up within a church without their menfolk, and to have the incessant clanging of that same church’s bell sounding its warning from the belfry above their heads.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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but I could see for myself that taxes and restrictions made trading increasingly difficult for all of us, that the high price of bread fell most heavily upon the poorer workmen, and that those who had the greatest amount of money—the nobility and the clergy—were excused from all forms of tax.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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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:
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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What is the truth?” I asked, in renewed agony of doubt—for had I, after all, done wrong in leaving my husband to his possible fate at le Chesne-Bidault? Were hordes of brigands even now setting fire to my home and everything I held dear? “The truth?” repeated Robert. “Nobody ever knows the truth in this world.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Now, of course, he’s all over me again, because he hopes The Glass-Blowers will do well. But I don’t believe it will sell in great numbers, as it doesn’t get exciting until halfway through, and readers are so impatient. But you know my thing these days about no books really selling enormously, except about animals – Elsa
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Daphne du Maurier (Letters from Menabilly: Portrait of a Friendship)
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A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that same breath, shatter and destroy it. If what I write displeases you, it will not matter. Throw my letters in the fire unread, and keep your illusions. For myself, I have always preferred to know the truth.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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I thought how lacking in intuition men could be in persuading themselves that mending some stranger’s socks, and attending to his comfort, could content a woman of thirty-eight like my sister Edmé, who, with her quick brain and passion for argument, would—had she lived in another age—have fought for her beliefs like Joan of Arc.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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My aunt Déméré was shocked. Her husband, my uncle Déméré, was one of the foremost important men in the foundry. He was a master melter, that is to say he prepared the mixture for the pots, and saw to it that the pots were filled with the right amount for the furnaces before the day’s melt, and never, since they had been married, had my aunt Déméré watched the potash being prepared by the flux-burner. “The first duty of a master’s wife is to have food ready for her husband between shifts,” she told my mother, “and then to attend to any women or children directly employed by her husband who may be sick. The work in the furnace house, or outside it, is nothing to do with
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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No, Robert did not understand. Handsome, gay, debonair, perfectly self-possessed, he had yet not grasped the fact that his young sister, with her smattering of education and her provincial dress, belonged to a world that he had long left behind him, a world which, despite its apparent backwardness and rustic simplicity, had greater depth than his.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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What a moment to bring a child into the world, that summer of ’93, the first year of the Republic; with the Vendée in revolt, the country at war, the traitorous Girondins endeavoring to bring down the Convention, the patriot Marat to be assassinated by an hysterical girl, and the unhappy ex-Queen Marie Antoinette confined in the Temple and later guillotined
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Slaughter on a scale far greater than any attempted by the Paris mob was the portion of those village patriots who dared to resist them. Women and children were not spared, men were thrown, while still alive, into ditches piled high with corpses. Clergy who had sworn the oath to the Constitution were tied to horses and dragged on the dusty roads to a terrible death.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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A mock trial was set in motion, and the mayor Montlibert forced to interrogate the prisoners. It was obvious, even to someone like myself who knew nothing of the law, that none of the men had done wrong. No arms had been found in the house. The men had no pretensions to being aristocrats. Monsieur Villette, who had presided over the proceedings in the church, spoke up in their defense.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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This astonished us as children, for we grew up beside the charcoal burners, called them by their Christian names, watched them at work, visited them in their log huts when they were ill; but to my mother, the bailiff’s daughter from St. Christophe, gently nurtured, educated and well spoken, the rude shouts of these wild men of the woods at midnight must have sounded like devils in hell.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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It was not until long afterwards that I heard the tale from Edmé. He all but beggared himself in the process, without a word to anyone but her, and was forced to sell his practice, a year later, and accept payment from the municipality as a public notary. I think, if anyone lived up to the principles of equality and brotherhood that had first inspired our revolution, it was my brother Pierre.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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We mounted the carriole and drove up the hill from l’Antinière onto the road. Looking back, we saw grandmother and grandson standing there hand in hand waving to us, and it was as though they represented all that was steadfast and enduring in past and future, while our own generation—Robert’s and mine—lacked stability, and was at the mercy of events which might prove too strong for all of us.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Naturally, at the outbreak of the Revolution he followed the example of the clergy and the aristocracy and emigrated to England with his young bride, my mother, and suffered much penury in consequence. His full name was Robert-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, and he died tragically and suddenly in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, on returning to France in the hopes of restoring the family fortunes.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Something within each one of us had been awakened that we had not known was there; some dream, desire, or doubt, flickered into life by that same rumor, took root, and flourished. We were none of us the same afterwards. Robert, Michel, François, Edmé, myself, were changed imperceptibly. The rumor, true or false, had brought into the open hopes and dreads which, hitherto concealed, would now be part of our ordinary living selves.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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I believe you,” I said. “And were there in those other diligences agents like yourself, paid either by Laclos for the duc d’Orléans, or by some other source, for the very purpose of spreading rumor, and so causing fear and panic through the country?” My brother smiled. He took up the knife and fork he had laid upon his plate. “My little sister,” he said gently, “your travels have exhausted you, and you don’t know what you are saying. I suggest you go to bed and sleep it off.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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Meantime, the Declaration of the Rights of Man made all men equal, if it did not make them brothers, and within a week of its passing into law there were riots in Le Mans, and disturbances in Paris too, with the price of bread as high as it had been before, and unemployment rife. Bakers were blamed in every city for charging too dearly for their four-pound loaf, and they in turn put the blame upon the grain merchants; all men were at fault save those who leveled the accusations.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
My own grief has no part in this story. Many women lose their first child. My mother, in the days before I was born, lost two within as many years. I had seen it happen twice to Cathie, and with the last she herself went as well. Men call us the weaker sex. Perhaps it’s true. Yet to carry life within us as we do, to feel it bud and flower and come from us fully formed as a living creature, separate though part of ourselves, and watch it fade and die—this asks for strength and spiritual endurance.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
Pierre and I refused to allow my mother to visit her son in prison. She remained in the house with Cathie and little Jacques, but we went ourselves, and I felt as if I were back again in the theater foyer… My brother was still the perfect dandy, dressed as though for a reception, with a clean shirt and neckerchief brought to him every day by one of his servers from the boutique in the Palais-Royal, along with wine and provisions, which he shared out with his fellow prisoners—a mixed bunch of debtors, rogues, and petty thieves.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
The streets were narrow and evil-smelling, with a broad stream running down the center to carry the sewage, and beggars holding out their hands for alms. I remember my sudden feeling of fright when my father’s back was turned to see to our luggage, and in a moment a woman had thrust her way between us, with two little barefooted children beside her, clamoring for money. When I drew back she shook her fist at me, and cursed. This was not the Paris I had expected, where all was gaiety, laughter, driving to the Opera, and bright lights.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
He is quite wrong,” Robert would argue. “Every young woman should know how to comport herself, and how to mix in society.” “Surely it depends upon the society?” I would reply, despite my anxiety to learn. “Take aunt Anne at Chérigny. Neither she, nor my uncle Viau, can sign their names properly, and they do very well as they are.” “No doubt,” said Robert, “and they will never move from Chérigny to the end of their days. You wait until I have a glass-house of my own, in Paris, and you come to visit me there. I can’t introduce my sister to society unless she does me credit.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
I confess I found myself disenchanted. We hardly moved from this quarter, so crowded, so ill-smelling, among the poorest of the people, and when we did walk out it was only to call at the various warehouses where my father did his business. I thought our charcoal burners at home in the forest of la Pierre were rough, but they were gentle and courteous compared with the people in the streets of Paris, who jostled us without apology, staring rudely all the while. Child as I was, I dared not venture out alone, but was obliged to stay beside my father the whole time, or remain in the bedroom at the Cheval Rouge.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
My brothers, my husband, even Edmé, my little sister, belonged to this moment, had waited for it, even, welcoming change as something they could themselves shape and possess, just as they molded glass to a new form. What they had been taught as children did not matter anymore. Those things were past and done with; only the future counted, a future which must be different in every way from what we had known. Why, then, did I lag behind? Why must I be reluctant? I thought of the winter, and how the families and ourselves had suffered, and I knew what Michel meant when he said it must never happen again; yet, even so, everything within me balked at what he had done.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
“
Take care,” my father used to say, when first instructing Robert in the art of blowing glass. “Control is of supreme importance. One false movement and the expanding glass will be shattered.” I remember the dawning excitement in my brother’s eyes—could he, dared he, go beyond the limits prescribed? It was as though he longed for the explosion that would wreck his own first effort and his father’s temper into the bargain. There comes this supreme moment to the glass-blower, when he can either breathe life and form into the growing bubble slowly taking shape before his eyes, or shatter it into a thousand fragments. The decision is the blower’s, and the judgment too; the throwing of the judgment in the balance made the excitement—for my brother.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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You look very pretty,” said my mother at last, opening the conversation. “And how do you like being the wife of a master glass-maker here at Rougemont?” “Well enough,” replied Cathie, “but I find it rather fatiguing.” “No doubt,” said my mother, “and a great responsibility. How many workmen are employed here, and how many of them are married with families?” Cathie opened large eyes. “I have no idea,” she said. “I have never spoken to any of them.” I thought this would silence my mother, but she quickly recovered. “In that case,” she continued, “what do you do with your time?” Cathie hesitated. “I give orders to the servants,” she said, “and I watch them polish the floors. The rooms are very spacious, as you can see.” “I can indeed,” replied my mother. “No wonder you are fatigued.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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The winter of 1789 was the hardest within living memory. No one, not even the old people of the district, had ever known anything like it. The cold weather set in early, and, coming on top of a bad harvest, led to great distress among the tenant farmers and the peasants. We were hard hit at the foundry too, for conditions on the road became impossible, what with frost and ice, and then snow; and we were unable to deliver our goods to Paris and the other big cities. This meant that we were left with unsold merchandise on our hands, and little prospect of getting rid of it in the spring, for in the meantime the traders in Paris would be buying elsewhere—if, that is, they ordered at all. There was a general drop in demand for luxury commodities at this time, owing to the unrest throughout the country.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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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.
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Daphne du Maurier (The Glass-Blowers)
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You said ‘The glass-blower’s cat is bompstable',” retorted Lord Peter. “It’s a perfectly rippin’ word, but I don’t know what you mean by it.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Clouds of Witness (Lord Peter Wimsey, #2))
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The international regime of intellectual property rights has significantly shaped the control and distribution of knowledge for hundreds of years. It’s a story that began innocently enough in the fifteenth century, when Venice started awarding its famed glass-blowers 10-year patents to protect their novel creations from imitators. Show us how you made it, promised the law, and no one is permitted to copy you for a decade.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called 'A Roma Therapy'.
In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn't sleep.
In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did stories about Ryan Bailey's relationships.
In one life she was the picture editor at the National Geographic.
In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral existence in a self-designed bungalow that harvested rain-water and ran on solar power.
In one life she was an aid worker in Bostwana.
In one life a cat-sitter.
In one life a volunteer in a homeless shelter.
In one life she was sleeping on her only friend's sofa.
In one life she taught music in Montreal.
In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn't know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying 'Do better' while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that.
In one life she had no social media accounts.
In one life she'd never drunk alcohol.
In one life she was a chess champion and currently visiting Ukraine for a tournament.
In one life she was married to a minor Royal and hated every minute.
In one life her Facebook and Instagram only contained quotes from Rumi and Lao Tzu.
In one life she was on to her third husband and already bored.
In one life she was a vegan power-lifter.
In one life she was travelling around South Corsican coast, and they talked quantum mechanics and got drunk together at a beachside bar until Hugo slipped away, out of that life, and mid-sentence, so Nora was left talking to a blank Hugo who was trying to remember her name.
In some lives Nora attracted a lot of attention. In some lives she attracted none. In some lives she was rich. In some lives she was poor. In some lives she was healthy. In some lives she couldn't climb the stairs without getting out of breath. In some lives she was in a relationship, in others she was solo, in many she was somewhere in between. In some lives she was a mother, but in most she wasn't.
She had been a rock star, an Olympics, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things. She'd had horrendous commutes in cars, on buses, in trains, on ferries, on bike, on foot. She'd had emails and emails and emails. She'd had a fifty-three-year-old boss with halitosis touch her leg under a table and text her a photo of his penis. She'd had colleagues who lied about her, and colleagues who loved her, and (mainly) colleagues who were entirely indifferent. In many lives she chose not to work and in some she didn't choose not to work but still couldn't find any. In some lives she smashed through the glass ceiling and in some she just polished it. She had been excessively over- and under-qualified. She had slept brilliantly and terribly. In some lives she was on anti-depressants and in others she didn't even take ibuprofen for a headache. In some lives she was a physically healthy hypochondriac and in some a seriously ill hypochondriac and in most she wasn't a hypochondriac at all. There was a life where she had chronic fatigue, a life where she had cancer, a life where she'd suffered a herniated disc and broken her ribs in a car accident.
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Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)