The story of six generations of the Playoust Family and its antecedents (the Delvas, the Leplats, the Dumortiers, and others) is told.
The French Revolution freed them from traditional village life. Four great wars notwithstanding, the 'long nineteenth century' brought an Industrial Revolution that swept them out of the French countryside into bourgeois life in the great textile centre of Roubaix-Tourcoing and thence 'au bout du monde' (to the bottom of the world) - Australia.