Short answers, pulled from the story.
Louis-Nicolas Robert was a French soldier and mechanical engineer born on the 2nd of December 1761. He invented the first machine to produce continuous paper, patented in 1799, which became the foundation of the Fourdrinier machine used in modern papermaking.
Robert's patent, granted by the French Government in 1799, covered a machine with a moving screen belt that received a continuous flow of pulp and delivered an unbroken sheet of wet paper to squeeze rolls. The machine could produce paper in lengths of 12 to 15 metres. The specification was published in the second volume of the Brevets d'Inventions Expirés.
Robert sold both the patent and the prototype machine to Saint-Léger Didot for 25,000 francs, but Didot defaulted on the payments. Robert recovered legal ownership on the 23rd of June 1801, but Didot's brother-in-law John Gamble had already taken the technology to England, where the Fourdrinier brothers financed its further development at a cost of approximately 60,000 pounds.
Robert's 1799 patent was the direct predecessor of the Fourdrinier machine. John Gamble, acting for Didot, brought Robert's design to London and received British patent 2487 on the 20th of October 1801. The Fourdrinier brothers then financed six years of further development, and the resulting machine carried their name rather than Robert's.
Robert retired from paper-making in 1812 in poor health and moved to Vernouillet in Eure-et-Loir, where he opened a small school called Faubourg St Thibault. He was poorly paid, and he died on the 8th of August 1828 in penury. A statue of him stands in front of the church in Vernouillet.
The current location of Robert's original drawings is unknown. In 1976, Leonard Schlosser discovered them at auction and made facsimiles for scholars and friends, but the whereabouts of the originals have not been established since.