Some extra family history
27 October 2020 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI think I've got a title for my wife-of-Raoul story, thanks to chapter 2: "An Outsider and a Foreigner", which Hertha uses of herself on arrival in Paris, but which would also apply to Christine if she were to be in a relationship with Raoul ;-p
About time, too, as the story deadline is Thursday and I've only typed up one paragraph so far!
(Actually, it occurs to me that people are more likely to assume that it is a description of a pair of characters, which is the opposite problem from the one I was having with my previous titles, which I felt were too obviously referring to the presence of an extra character. Oh well...)
I was vaguely thinking that I would kill off Hertha's mother in order to provide a rationale for them to leave Vienna, in the absence of any obvious persecution motive — however, I decided that if she were going to be viewed as an heiress it would be better for her to have a living mother, because otherwise her father might potentially marry again, father an heir, and cut her out ;-p (It now occurs to me that this probably wouldn't be the case under European law; certainly not under French law of the period, which as we know from the case of Leroux-Raoul divided property equally among all children, including daughters. No idea what Austrian law would have been, but given the notorious infinitely small procreational subdivisions of the German-speaking princely states I suspect it was similar.)
In any case, I decided to endow her with an older brother who died, which turns out to put an interesting extra dynamic in the family's relationship with Raoul. It also means that for once we have a couple of characters who both have living parents instead of being quasi-orphans — since I've already established that Raoul has a somewhat querulous elderly mother in this universe.
Hertha's father is Thaddeus (i.e. probably Tadeusz) Graupmann — Baron Graupmann — although I'm not sure his first name is actually going to feature in the story, and her brother is Rudi, presumably Rudolf.
I haven't quite decided whether Raoul's father is alive or not. If his mother is putting pressure on him to marry young and produce heirs, I think the elder Vicomte may be dead (this Raoul is evidently the child of his parents' old age, like Leroux-Raoul in canon but without the set of siblings). On the other hand, she may simply want her husband to see grandchildren before he dies ;-p
Anyway, I need to abandon my rather sketchy chapter 2 for the moment and get on with typing up chapter 1 in order to have time to review it properly.
About time, too, as the story deadline is Thursday and I've only typed up one paragraph so far!
(Actually, it occurs to me that people are more likely to assume that it is a description of a pair of characters, which is the opposite problem from the one I was having with my previous titles, which I felt were too obviously referring to the presence of an extra character. Oh well...)
I was vaguely thinking that I would kill off Hertha's mother in order to provide a rationale for them to leave Vienna, in the absence of any obvious persecution motive — however, I decided that if she were going to be viewed as an heiress it would be better for her to have a living mother, because otherwise her father might potentially marry again, father an heir, and cut her out ;-p (It now occurs to me that this probably wouldn't be the case under European law; certainly not under French law of the period, which as we know from the case of Leroux-Raoul divided property equally among all children, including daughters. No idea what Austrian law would have been, but given the notorious infinitely small procreational subdivisions of the German-speaking princely states I suspect it was similar.)
In any case, I decided to endow her with an older brother who died, which turns out to put an interesting extra dynamic in the family's relationship with Raoul. It also means that for once we have a couple of characters who both have living parents instead of being quasi-orphans — since I've already established that Raoul has a somewhat querulous elderly mother in this universe.
Hertha's father is Thaddeus (i.e. probably Tadeusz) Graupmann — Baron Graupmann — although I'm not sure his first name is actually going to feature in the story, and her brother is Rudi, presumably Rudolf.
I haven't quite decided whether Raoul's father is alive or not. If his mother is putting pressure on him to marry young and produce heirs, I think the elder Vicomte may be dead (this Raoul is evidently the child of his parents' old age, like Leroux-Raoul in canon but without the set of siblings). On the other hand, she may simply want her husband to see grandchildren before he dies ;-p
Anyway, I need to abandon my rather sketchy chapter 2 for the moment and get on with typing up chapter 1 in order to have time to review it properly.