"Smoke stacks and sluices and hungry furnaces are changing the face of nineteenth-century France in this 1859 novel by the controversial, passionately socialist George Sand. And the factories are taking their toll, too, on the fortunes of earnest, young Etienne Lavoute, whose mastery as a metalsmith has won him the name Sept-Epees (or Seven Blades). A man with a dream, Sept-Epees wants desperately to free himself not from the working class to which he was born but from the woes imposed upon it by lofty mill owners. While ambition is the spur that prompts Sept-Epees to purchase a ramshackle factory he is ill-equipped to run, love is the secret cause. For Sept-Epees, however misguidedly, would make himself worthy of the willful but kind Tonine Gaucher."--BOOK JACKET.