Igenlode Wordsmith

Apparently Dumas can't decide on the appearance of the Vicomte de Bragelonne :-p

His characters, where it is mentioned, are all mainly dark-haired, with the notable and probably conscious exception of Milady and her son who are both described as distinctively fair( Read more... )

But we are told that d'Artagnan, on observing a rider making a stealthy exit from Athos' home at dawn, reconnut le justaucorps grenat et les cheveux bruns de Raoul, which struck me at the time as being unexpected in a world where practically no-one has plain brown hair... which is why I then noticed with some surprise that when Athos takes him to visit Madame de Chevreuse in Paris, the allusion there is to ses cheveux noirs[...] élégamment partagés comme on les portait à cette époque! However it seemed not implausible that 'cheveux bruns' could simply have been intended to refer to 'dark hair' in general, so I assumed I'd simply misinterpreted the original phrase.

Matters become completely confused, on the other hand, when we reach the epilogue and d'Artagnan refers fondly to the boy as cette chère tête blonde! So I think that all that can be concluded is that Dumas had no very fixed idea in mind and ascribed a random appearance to Raoul at various different points during the construction of his lengthy serial...

(Given that his father is consistently described as dark-haired and his mother fair an intermediate brown would presumably have made sense :-)

I went sleeveless due to the heat for the first time this summer (something I can only risk when I know I'm going to be indoors all day) and managed to display an impressive blue tracery of veins underneath the aristocratically pale and translucent skin thus revealed ;-)
( Read more... )

My first poached-egg flower has now come out :-)
Unfortunately I think the ants have transferred their base of operations to the miniature rose pot, where I keep finding the main stem sheathed in earth (presumably from their excavations?) to a height of several inches, with frenetic activity going on around the pot. I daren't empty out the pot to locate and remove the nest for fear of killing off the rose and/or the fragments of the yellow poppy that have reappeared, but on the other hand I'm worried that the ants will end up doing just that :-(

Finally got round to proof-reading this, long after I typed it and about nine months after it was written, mainly on the grounds that I need to upload it *before* uploading "Think Only This of Me" if it is ever to get any eyeballs on it at all. Twenty Years After fics get pitifully few hits anyway, but since there is no fandom whatsoever for "The Yellow Poppy" the only scenario in which anyone is ever likely even to glance at this is if they are reading something else of mine and are checking my other recent works. Although nobody is likely to get as far as chapter 3 anyway on that basis... I did a review swap on fanfiction.net and got a review on chapter 1 which said that, despite all my efforts on rewriting the start, it felt as if the reader was being "expositioned at", which is incredibly depressing: I *cannot* do any more rewriting on this, so am just stuck with a non-working story :-(

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Chapter 3 — Revelation

The long room was panelled in white and gilt, and Valentine de Trélan, seated at an escritoire at the far end, wore a gown of a dusky rose colour; not draperies of the modern fashion in Paris that left very little to the imagination, nor a daringly slim gown such as that worn by Marthe de Céligny, but a sedate dress more suited to one her age. Only she did not look any older.

( Read more... )

I spent a happy evening attempting to grab some screen captures of Porthos and d'Artagnan to go with my new fic (since the "Twenty Years After" film conveniently provides footage of the two of them together at Bragelonne, as per my story, although in canon Porthos doesn't ever come there (and hence is implicitly seeing the house for the first time in my AU)... :-p)
http://ivory.ueuo.com/Tower/Albums/Porthos_pics/

This was a rather hit and miss operation, given the hefty shutter delay on screencaps: I did coincidentally grab a halfway decent image of Porthos, Raoul and d'Artagnan at Bragelonne without Athos in shot, although I was actually trying to get a usable picture of Porthos at the time! ( Low resolution footage )

So after that I went back to the scenes of d'Artagnan and Porthos together at Pierrefonds, and got quite a few decent shots of the two of them together which could potentially be used as an AO3 illustration, and some better vertical format close-ups of Porthos on his own for FFnet. ( Read more... )

( I had forgotten how endearing the morning-after scene is! )

I now need to decide on (probably) one horizontal and one vertical image out of the sixteen. I'm tempted to add the fortuitous Raoul-in-frame pic as a 'happy ending' illustration, although it has to be said that it isn't objectively very good.

I watched the finale of "Twenty Years After" (no crib, no subtitles) and I loved it! I have to say I'm pretty sure this is extremely non-canonical -- surely, surely in Dumas Mordaunt doesn't survive Athos' dagger? -- but then this is why we watch the film adaptation before rereading the book :-)

If only I'd been able to speak Russian, how my heart would have soared to see this come out back in 1992, because it was *exactly* the type of content that had filled my dreams since childhood, just as "Pirates of the Caribbean" would send me into joyous fandom in 2003. ( I get a little carried away describing the episode )

( Things that I loved )

N.B. At this point YouTube has clearly decided that I am Russian, because not only is it no longer offering to translate the comments into English, thus making my life far harder, but it has now started offering to translate comments on English-language videos into Russian for me...ooops!


Objectively speaking... is this film as good (and as delightful) as the first film? ( It was worth it anyway )

( Part 3? )

I *think* I've finished my Porthos-fic (which is of course going to need a title, although its filename is clearly going to be 'Porthos'!) I'm not sure that I've entirely captured Porthos' 'voice', either in speech or in thought-patterns, although there were intermittent bits that I was pleased with in that respect -- I may need to go through and try to simplify my convoluted syntax a *lot*...

I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
( Aramis' faith )

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( Fic length )

As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...

My sorrel has been obviously badly ( pot-bound ). Under the circumstances it's quite surprising that it did thrive for so long, though sorrel is tough.

( Rudbeckias )

I also potted up the two catch-up tomatoes, one of which died as a result of transplantation (so of the original three we now have one, which is all I actually needed... inasmuch as I actually 'need' an extra tomato plant at all, since the five adult ones seem to be taking up quite a bit of room right now!)

I took out the overwintered corn-marigold, which had basically finished flowering and had had a lot of the strength sucked out of it by the blackfly, despite my best efforts. I have a couple of flowers showing up in that same pot which I think come from the 'buckwheat seed' packet of (apparently American) wildflower seed that I remember scattering in there on the offchance. One is a pink cornflower, and my ordinary blue cornflowers are all opening now as well :-)

Les Trois Mousquetaires ou
Le collier de la Reine

A French aide-memoire running from "one times three is three" up to "ten times three is thirty"... with a little help from Athos, Porthos and Aramis :-D

(at any rate, it amused me...)

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Les Trois Mousquetaires
Vont en Angleterre ;
Leur habit porte une croix,
Trois fois un, trois.

Penchés au bord du bateau,
Ils voient leur reflet dans l'eau,
Athos, Porthos, Aramis !
Trois fois deux, six.

( Read more... )

I finally dedicated myself to doing a thorough re-watch of the 55-minute chunk of "Twenty Years After" that I had viewed 'blind' and unsubtitled as it was originally intended -- which took about six or eight hours of study spread over two days. Next time I'm going to have to try to force myself to stop watching sooner... although in fact there are only about 30 minutes left of the story, including end-credits :-(

( subtitles )

One of the non-subtitled lines, when I listened to it more carefully, turned out to be Porthos randomly observing that d'Artagnan looked good in a beard, which amused me mightily given my original comments on the scene ("for someone whose moustache has more or less been a permanent trademark since the start of his career, Mikhail Boyarsky actually looks pretty good in a 'full set' :-D)
Boyarsky in a beard

In fact as usual I did get pretty much all of it plot-wise on the first viewing, while the 'crib' filled in most of the longer/more rapid dialogues where I could only catch a few words (but generally sufficient to identify those sections in the novel, e.g. Milo of Croton, who unsurprisingly defeated me entirely when encountered as an unexpected subject of prison conversation :-p) The big changes from the novel are, I think, actually active *improvements*: ( Read more... )

( Madame de Chevreuse )

( Shipping? )

Dates and ages (probably mutually inconsistent)

Athos tells Raoul on their arrival in Paris that he spent seven of the sweetest and yet most bitter years of his life in his old lodgings on the rue Férou (including the further years after d'Artagnan's promotion?)

He appeals to Porthos during the confrontation at the Place Royale on the grounds that "we slept ten years side by side", presumably referring to the length of time over which the two of them served together as musketeers.

( The age of Aramis )