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THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS
And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according
to the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child?
Where was she?
What was she doing?
After leaving her little Cosette with the Thenardiers, she
had continued her journey, and had reached M. sur M.
This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.
Fantine had quitted her province ten years before.
M. sur M. had changed its aspect.
While Fantine had been slowly descending from wretchedness
to wretchedness, her native town had prospered.
About two years previously one of those industrial facts which
are the grand events of small districts had taken place.
This detail is important, and we regard it as useful to develop
it at length; we should almost say, to underline it.
From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry
the imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany.
This industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price
of the raw material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the
moment when Fantine returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation
had taken place in the production of "black goods."
Towards the close of 1815 a man, a stranger, had established himself
in the town, and had been inspired with the idea of substituting,
in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin, and, for bracelets in
particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid together, for slides
of soldered sheet-iron.
This very small change had effected a revolution.
This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced
the cost of the raw material, which had rendered it possible in
the first place, to raise the price of manufacture, a benefit
to the country; in the second place, to improve the workmanship,
an advantage to the consumer; in the third place, to sell at a
lower price, while trebling the profit, which was a benefit to
the manufacturer.
Thus three results ensued from one idea.
In less than three years the inventor of this process had
become rich, which is good, and had made every one about him rich,
which is better.
He was a stranger in the Department.
Of his origin, nothing was known; of the beginning of his
career, very little. It was rumored that he had come to town with
very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.
It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service
of an ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he
had drawn his own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside.
On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the
appearance, and the language of a workingman.
It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry
into the little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December
evening, knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire
had broken out in the town-hall. This man had rushed into the
flames and saved, at the risk of his own life, two children who
belonged to the captain of the gendarmerie; this is why they had
forgotten to ask him for his passport.
Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father
Madeleine.
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