Unfortunately, in addition to the crisis which was affecting the whole of Western economy, there was also the unsettling effect of profound, yet uncertain changes which were taking place within the textile industry at that period. In particular, there was talk of rotary looms, but these were a revolutionary innovation and their first users would be taking on incalculable risks. To begin with, Edouard was much attracted by a specialty of the Pierres Sonnantes called grenadine, a figured silk and wool mixture, a light; clear, transparent fabric manufactured exclusively for the great couture houses. He was entranced by the team of weavers and the ancient Jacquard employed for this luxury fabric and devoted all his efforts to the unprofitable line with its unreliable and not particularly rewarding outlets.

The firm’s survival actually rested on the shoulders of Guy Le Plorec, once a working mechanic, who had risen to foreman and now acted as assistant manager. Le Plorec had found the answer to the Pierres Sonnantes’ difficulties at the opposite pole from the grenadine, by combining with the warping and weaving sheds a mattress shop of thirty female carders which had the advantage of taking up a large part of the material manufactured on the premises. But this innovation had helped to make Edouard lose interest in a business which was full of hazards and pitfalls and now seemed able to survive only by a descent into vulgarity. Furthermore, the opening of the mattress shop had brought in an additional work force of largely unskilled girls, with no tradition of craftsmanship and prone to absenteeism and discontent, very unlike the disciplined, aristocratic body of warpers and weavers.

It was this aspect of Le Plorec’s little revolution that Edouard felt most deeply. For such a ladies’ man to become the head of a firm employing three hundred and twenty-seven women was at once galling and exciting. At first, whenever he ventured into the throbbing, dusty workrooms, he was embarrassed by the covert curiosity he aroused, which contained every shade of provocativeness, contempt, respect, and nervousness. To begin with, he was incapable of restoring the femininity to the gray-overalled figures in colored headscarves moving about the sizing machines and along the breast beams and felt as though an ironical fate had made him king of a race of specters. But gradually his eyes began to enjoy the sight of the women coming to work in the morning and going home at night, normally dressed now, some of them neat and even smart, their faces alive with chatter and laughter, their movements light, graceful, and charming. After that he would take trouble to single out in the narrow lanes that ran between the machines some girl or other whose figure he had noticed outside. The apprenticeship had taken him months, but it had borne fruit, and from then on Edouard knew how to perceive youth and beauty and prettiness underneath the working clothes and drudgery.

All the same he would have shrunk from seducing one of his women workers, much less making one of them his regular, kept mistress. Edouard had no principles to speak of and the example of his brother Gustave strengthened him in his distrust of morality and his fear of the arid puritanism that could lead to the worst aberrations. What he had, on the other hand, was taste, a very strong instinct for what could be done—even in violation of every written law—without disturbing a certain harmony, and what, on the contrary, must be avoided as bad form. Now this harmony demanded that the Pierres Sonnantes should be the accredited sphere of his family and that the only proper place for his extramarital affairs was in Paris. Besides which, the working girl remained for him a disturbing creature, impossible to associate with because she upset his ideas about women. Women might work, certainly, but at domestic chores, or, if absolutely necessary, on a farm or in a shop. To work in a factory must go against their nature. Women might be given money, certainly— for the home, for personal adornment, to amuse themselves, or for no reason at all. A weekly wage was degrading to them. Such were the beliefs of this pleasant, simple man who spontaneously radiated around him an atmosphere of carefree gaiety without which he could not live. But there were times when he felt crushed with loneliness between his ever-pregnant wife, exclusively preoccupied with her children, and the gray, toiling mass at the Pierres Sonnantes. “I am the useless drone in between the queen bee and the workers,” he would say with playful melancholy. And then he would drive to Dinan and take the fast train to Paris.

To the provincial that he was, Paris could not be anything but a place of brilliant life and fulfillment and, left to himself, he would have looked for a flat near the Opéra and the Grands Boulevards. Maria-Barbara, having been duly consulted about this important undertaking, and taken to Paris several times, had made a choice of the Quai d’Anjou, on the Ile Saint-Louis, where the view of leaves and water and arched masonry suited her own calm, horizontal outlook on life. What was more, it meant that Edouard was only a few minutes away from the rue des Banes, where his mother lived with his younger brother, Alexandre. He settled into the place, for its dignity and prestige appealed to a basic conservatism in him, even while it bored the playboy who would have liked more noise and excitement.

This coming and going of Edouard’s between Paris and Brittany was like the intermediate position he occupied between his two brothers, the elder, Gustave, who remained in the family home at Rennes, and the younger, Alexandre, who had nagged his mother into going to live with him in Paris. It was hard to imagine a more irreconcilable contrast than that between Gustave’s almost puritanical austerity, aggravated by stinginess, and the blatant dandyism Alexandre affected. Brittany, a traditionally conservative and religious region, provides many examples of families where the elder brother has a rigid respect for the ancestral values and is opposed by a younger who is subversive, iconoclastic and altogether scandalous.