By Hugh Schofield BBC News, París Image source, UNITED PRESS PHOTO/AFP Dame Daphne du Maurier, the English author who passedaway in 1989, was interested by her French heritage. The author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn hadactually been brought up on tales of an noble forefather who came to London throughout the French Revolution, gettingaway the guillotine and the militant sans-culottes. But when she started looking into her household history, she found it was all rather more madecomplex. Far from being nobles, her French forefathers were in truth bourgeois craftsmens whose trade was glassmaking. And the 1790 émigré was not a runaway from the innovative mob, however from a debtors’ jail. Today it is possible to retrace the steps of Daphne du Maurier, as she brought out her researchstudy in France in the 1950s. Driving around the Perche area, 120 miles (190km) south-west of Paris, she wentto the plantations, châteaux and glass foundries that included in her household story. Image source, Anne Hall: Sur les pas de Daphné Du Maurier Image caption, Du Maurier included an old glass foundry in her 1963 unique The Glass-Blowers They endedupbeing the setting for her 1963 historic unique The Glass-Blowers, in which she informed of her great-great-grandfather Robert Busson, of his modest roots making fragrance bottles in the forests near Le Mans, and how he came to sire an creative dynasty of English du Mauriers in London. The beginning point of her takesatrip was the home in the town of Le Gué de Launay which was when the house of her forefather’s sis, a lady called Sophie Duval. It was Sophie’s letters, composed in the 1840s and now maintained at Exeter University, that formed the basis of all future examinations, since in them, Sophie looked back at her own long life. She was born in the 1760s, the child, sis and then the partner of glass-blowers. Daphne du Maurier set the opening scene of her unique The Glass-Blowers on the balcony of the home, and it is still there much as it was, concealed inthemiddleof the wooded vales and pastures. “Daphne du Maurier came here to get a sense of location for the opening of her book,” states the present Anglo-French owner Mary Buisson, herself a fan of the author. “We utilized to read her books under the sheets at our convent. Who would have idea I would end up in the home of her forefather?” This part of France is still really forested. Back in the 18th Century, it was even more so. This, plus mostlikely the arrival of Italian artisans at some unrecorded point in middleages time, led to it endingupbeing one of the nation’s primary centres of pre-industrial er
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