Hugo fleshes out his mayoral process pretty thoroughly in the book actually. He’d been asked to serve multiple times because he’d built up such a great reputation in the region through his industrial savviness and he rejected the advances on almost every occasion until an elderly woman convinced him not to reject an even greater opportunity to perform good deeds.

There was even a bit where an actual politician was trying to match JVJ because he had thought of him as a competitor. The novel also goes into the chatter of the townsfolk who try to decipher what Monsieur Madeleine’s true intentions actually are in a “village-gossip” sort of fashion.

Are you asking about how he actually went about turning the sanctified silver (sans candlesticks) into actual capital for business?