In deep mourning
11 November 2020 02:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've managed to get myself enmeshed in more complicated timeline implications by dropping references without having a clear plan beforehand.
In chapter 1, Raoul is stated to be twenty-one years old and to have a forthcoming birthday (presumably his twenty-second). At the time of Christine's performance, he has been married for nine months. Hertha knew him when he was seventeen.
So far in chapter 2, Hertha has a conversation with her parents about marriage "the summer I turned nineteen" (at which point she has presumably known Raoul for a couple of years; I was carefully vague about how old she was when her brother died and about how long they spent in Baden Baden). She has another conversation with her mother "over a year later" on the eve of her marriage to Raoul, for which "the final arrangements had taken months". At some earlier point -- presumably months earlier, so possibly in the spring or summer in which she turns twenty -- she has a conversation with Raoul himself, when he tells her that his father is dying and "can't last out the year" and effectively proposes marriage, while "it would be some months yet before he was twenty-one". Raoul's father then dies three weeks after the wedding, and we get immersed in the complications of 19th-century mourning rituals.
I'd hoped that these were an English phenomenon, but no such luck: le grand deuil was very much a thing, especially with the rise to power of the bourgeois who aspired to imitate the rituals of the aristocracy. Unfortunately the mourning period was very long; two years for a widow, one for a widower. It doesn't really matter whether Raoul's mother is secluded for the period of the main action, but we've already established that the young Vicomte and his wife are in full evening dress and attending the opera less than nine months later :-(
Reading that book, I thought I could get away with a six months' mourning period for the death of a father/father-in-law, but in fact all the tables of etiquette give eighteen.
https://fr.geneawiki.com/index.php/Deuil
Règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne, 1889
The whole thing is such a mess that it would probably be simpler if the old Vicomte simply doesn't die -- apart from the fact that this was my bright idea as to why, specifically, Raoul is under a pressing obligation to marry, and if his father not only doesn't die in the months before the wedding but apparently doesn't die in the following year and a half either, that puts poor Raoul in the position of having been married off under false pretences :-( Plus I'd now got as far as writing the mourning period into the relationships within the story -- the three or four paragraphs I've achieved with such difficulty over the past week.
I'd considered giving the Vicomte a non-fatal stroke as a passing idea, but I've already used that device for Philippe and Leroux-Raoul (in an attempt to sort out the discrepancies of that timeline!) in The Sons of Éléonore, and don't want to repeat it or to confuse the two universes...
Even if we complete ignore mourning periods for the moment, we've still got the issue of when exactly I'm attempting to set the main action. I don't think ALW-canon says anything about the time of year, save for the six months between Acts I and II. I think I was originally going for my head-canon of a December birthday for Raoul (I deleted a line which read "he'd be twenty-one come winter"), having him marry pretty much as soon as he turns twenty-one, and implicitly setting "Hannibal" in the autumn (with Hertha anticipating Raoul's birthday later that year) and the Masquerade at Easter, which is about as close as you can get to Leroux's chronology, where the whole novel takes place over a rather shorter period. I was picturing Hertha as about six months younger, with a summer birthday, though she could potentially be six months older if that suits the timing better -- it would certainly fit the characterisation ;-p
So if Raoul has been married for nine months and is twenty-one, rising twenty-two, he must have been married somewhere around midwinter. If the marriage took place over a year after the summer in which Hertha was nineteen, it would implicitly have been that autumn, while they were both still twenty, and the proposal would have been in the summer. 'Over a year' might stretch to a year and a half, I suppose... I think the main conflict that is subconsciously worrying me is between Raoul's 'forthcoming birthday' in the opening scene and the pre-marital conversation 'over a year' after Hertha's nineteenth birthday, and neither of those is exactly precise (though I find it hard to imagine Hertha planning a musical programme for an impromptu performance more than three months in advance, however grandiose her ideas!) I think the 'some months yet before he was twenty-one' and the mention of the marriage negotiations having taken months were intended to cancel each other out, so that he does marry pretty much at the time of his twenty-first birthday. Whenever that is.
In chapter 1, Raoul is stated to be twenty-one years old and to have a forthcoming birthday (presumably his twenty-second). At the time of Christine's performance, he has been married for nine months. Hertha knew him when he was seventeen.
So far in chapter 2, Hertha has a conversation with her parents about marriage "the summer I turned nineteen" (at which point she has presumably known Raoul for a couple of years; I was carefully vague about how old she was when her brother died and about how long they spent in Baden Baden). She has another conversation with her mother "over a year later" on the eve of her marriage to Raoul, for which "the final arrangements had taken months". At some earlier point -- presumably months earlier, so possibly in the spring or summer in which she turns twenty -- she has a conversation with Raoul himself, when he tells her that his father is dying and "can't last out the year" and effectively proposes marriage, while "it would be some months yet before he was twenty-one". Raoul's father then dies three weeks after the wedding, and we get immersed in the complications of 19th-century mourning rituals.
I'd hoped that these were an English phenomenon, but no such luck: le grand deuil was very much a thing, especially with the rise to power of the bourgeois who aspired to imitate the rituals of the aristocracy. Unfortunately the mourning period was very long; two years for a widow, one for a widower. It doesn't really matter whether Raoul's mother is secluded for the period of the main action, but we've already established that the young Vicomte and his wife are in full evening dress and attending the opera less than nine months later :-(
Reading that book, I thought I could get away with a six months' mourning period for the death of a father/father-in-law, but in fact all the tables of etiquette give eighteen.
https://fr.geneawiki.com/index.php/Deuil
Règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne, 1889
Le deuil de père ou de mère, celui de frère ou de soeur se portent de la même façon, avec les mêmes gradations, seulement ils diffèrent de durée : le deuil de père et de mère, dix-huit-mois ; de grand-père et de grand'mère, un an ; de frère ou de sœur, dix mois ; d'oncle ou de tante, six mois ; de cousin germain, de parrain, trois mois.
Durant la première moitié du deuil, on s'abstient de tous plaisirs, de toutes distractions. Dès le commencement de la seconde période, on se permet des conférences sérieuses, les expositions ; on fait des visites, on reprend son jour. Vers la fin du deuil, - deux mois avant son expiration – on rétablit son five o'clock tea, on donne à dîner, on assiste à un concert. Le deuil terminé, on commence à reparaître dans de petites soirées, sans danser encore ; on va au Théâtre-Français, puis à l'Opéra, peu à peu, on rentre dans le train de la vie ordinaire.
The whole thing is such a mess that it would probably be simpler if the old Vicomte simply doesn't die -- apart from the fact that this was my bright idea as to why, specifically, Raoul is under a pressing obligation to marry, and if his father not only doesn't die in the months before the wedding but apparently doesn't die in the following year and a half either, that puts poor Raoul in the position of having been married off under false pretences :-( Plus I'd now got as far as writing the mourning period into the relationships within the story -- the three or four paragraphs I've achieved with such difficulty over the past week.
I'd considered giving the Vicomte a non-fatal stroke as a passing idea, but I've already used that device for Philippe and Leroux-Raoul (in an attempt to sort out the discrepancies of that timeline!) in The Sons of Éléonore, and don't want to repeat it or to confuse the two universes...
Even if we complete ignore mourning periods for the moment, we've still got the issue of when exactly I'm attempting to set the main action. I don't think ALW-canon says anything about the time of year, save for the six months between Acts I and II. I think I was originally going for my head-canon of a December birthday for Raoul (I deleted a line which read "he'd be twenty-one come winter"), having him marry pretty much as soon as he turns twenty-one, and implicitly setting "Hannibal" in the autumn (with Hertha anticipating Raoul's birthday later that year) and the Masquerade at Easter, which is about as close as you can get to Leroux's chronology, where the whole novel takes place over a rather shorter period. I was picturing Hertha as about six months younger, with a summer birthday, though she could potentially be six months older if that suits the timing better -- it would certainly fit the characterisation ;-p
So if Raoul has been married for nine months and is twenty-one, rising twenty-two, he must have been married somewhere around midwinter. If the marriage took place over a year after the summer in which Hertha was nineteen, it would implicitly have been that autumn, while they were both still twenty, and the proposal would have been in the summer. 'Over a year' might stretch to a year and a half, I suppose... I think the main conflict that is subconsciously worrying me is between Raoul's 'forthcoming birthday' in the opening scene and the pre-marital conversation 'over a year' after Hertha's nineteenth birthday, and neither of those is exactly precise (though I find it hard to imagine Hertha planning a musical programme for an impromptu performance more than three months in advance, however grandiose her ideas!) I think the 'some months yet before he was twenty-one' and the mention of the marriage negotiations having taken months were intended to cancel each other out, so that he does marry pretty much at the time of his twenty-first birthday. Whenever that is.
